Okay. Looks like we're good,
Wow, it's been a minute!
man. Duke has been a long one, a long minute. This is not even not a New York minute, a long minute.
jeepers, it's like You fall asleep in November, you wake up, you're in February.
Yes. Right. Like holidays and snow and you name it.
And the older I get, the worse that is. Like I wake up and it's like, Wait a second, my last memory was like five months ago!
right, like what happened through all of January? No freaking clue
Yeah,
is IKEA. I can't believe it's even February.
Wow. Okay, so, what are we talking about today?
All right, Duke. Today we're going to talk about how you can align your past work life to the service now world,
Yes, don't know about you, I get this one a lot. With, the new entrances system, maybe they've gotten a couple of certs already going through next gen, whatever, but they still have this, Hey, I had this whole life before service now. And what do I do with that?
I wish I got that one more, right? I actually don't get it often at all. But I think it's incredibly valuable to think about it that way.
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not like they're always asking me, But it'll be somebody who maybe had a military 20 years of all kinds of cool stuff in the armed forces. And you read the resume and maybe they're not asking it explicitly, but you can see a pathway for them to parlay it that they're not taking themselves
Absolutely.
help that at no part of our education does anybody teach you how to really write resume like my dad taught me. And then I've learned to rest along the way. It's just really a shame. Like school, college, like nobody teaches you.
Well, this is where I'll give a lot of credit to the high school. I went to right. I learned in a class how to do a handshake, How to write a resume, test taking skills. you other things just like very life oriented kind of these skills would translate, from now until the end of time for you. No matter what happens. And they were right. You know, my handshake when I, when I meet someone, like they consistently mentioned my handshake and yeah. I learned that in school
It warms my heart that we can find that. I hope your school is still around,
they are. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if they still have that class. I hope so, but man, it was good. I even still remember the teacher's name. Shout out to miss Branigan.
Shout out to Miss Branigan. This episode is for you. I guess let's get to the brass tacks. You just throw some, ideas. The first thing I would say. Is to not boil down your past experiences, whether it's a deep past experience or even maybe you're like new to the workforce at all, try not to boil it down to, assessments of your character. You know what I mean? Like people who say highly motivated, thrive on problem solving. I'm not saying it's bad.
I'm just saying that's the kind of information that gets instantly erased in somebody's mind as soon as they read it.
I can, see that, right? Like, I'm a a plus problem solver. Yeah. Everyone says that.
It's one of those things that's so easy to say that actually everybody says it. Everybody says it. who would not self describe as being a problem solver, or highly motivated?
I think everybody would. if I'm being honest, right. It really depends for with me. Well, I'm a, I'm an amazing problem solver. Probably one of the best in the business on that. Right. but in terms of highly motivated, that comes and goes.
hmm. Yeah, motivation's fickle, right? Like, I don't care if I'm motivated or not, like, I'm gonna pound that coffee down and get it done.
Yeah. Right. Like, sometimes that's just what you have to do.
Yep, how I feel about it on the inside like who cares really not the person who's asking me to get it done. That's for sure
Yeah. Not the person paying you to get it done. Absolutely. Right.
right. That's right
They got expectations and, you got to show up so highly motivated. That's table stakes. Right. So let's move on from that. And what else you got, you know?
stakes is a great way to put it Like everybody is going to come to their resume with at least that so I guess more charitably. Just assume they already have the highest envision of your character that they can already like they let's just assume that they know that you're a hard worker that you're motivated to get this job that you take it all seriously let's just assume that they know that now what do you bring right
Yeah, what's next? What have you done? What do you bring? Illustrate to me, that you fit the requirements of this position. Show me, how do you communicate that in an interview? Because that's ultimately what it is. Right. And I say this a lot, but probably not a lot enough and probably not loud enough. Right. When you look at the job requirements for a job posting. And you see something that's 20 years of experience or something like that.
They don't really care if you've been doing this 20 years. They care if you have, Experience that is commiserate with the average person who has been doing this 20 years. And what I mean by experience, I mean, skill. Right.
It's such a clear picture on my mind is when I see that must have X years, I imagine somebody asking, is it cold outside? Compared to what, by what standard do we judge that? And if I say, like, when I breathe in really hard, like, my nose hairs freeze together. that's a level of cold that everybody can relate to. And so, when they're saying like 20 years, they're not gonna throw you out of bed for 19 and a half years, or even 18 years, or even 10 years. It's a heuristic,
Yes.
So they don't like, they're just trying to put something out there that looks like a model of what they're imagining.
Absolutely. Right. And right. Not a hard barrier at all. Right. But it is a barrier. It's a level. It's a filter. They want to say, do a self assessment, And if you don't feel like you've have the experience of somebody who's been doing this 20 years, or if you don't feel like you have the skill set of someone who's been doing this for 20 years, probably not the job for you because those are our expectations.
yeah, the way I like to express how they're, what they're looking for is, agency,
Yeah. Oh yeah,
like, if you look up on Miriam, it's the capacity condition or state of acting or exerting power or a person or thing through which power is exerted or end is achieved. an established agent in doing business for another, like your agency is basically like you have to do this job on behalf of a person or an organization. And so the more you can show agency of the same type of the same scale, hopefully both, the better you are getting this.
yeah, absolutely. When I think about agency is, am I going to have to tell you what to do every step of the way? Right?
There's so many, people out there that are anxious to learn right and can learn really well. But I think when people are trying to load up their job descriptions with must have this many years experience is they're saying as much as possible. We don't want to have to teach you
Yes. Like, we want you to be able to learn, right? We just don't want to be able to teach you. We don't want to teach it to you.
Exactly. And let's be super charitable here because maybe they don't have that time. if they had that time, maybe they would have picked somebody internally and just say, Hey, listen, you're not a mail room clerk anymore. You're a service now, Dav, and we're gonna, send you on a course or whatever. Just trust and believe that what they want is somebody who has receipts of being able to just take stuff over.
Like, if you can imagine what you could do to say that on day one, you can start doing stuff valuable for them
Yeah.
them directly. So the more agency you can show. And so, this is where I feel people who have had radically different, but accomplished stuff in their past lives, really, discount that past experience. I was talking to one, he was in the armed services, and he Was on the technology side and they basically, as the army does just says, Hey, congratulations, you're in charge of this now, never seen it before. and he had to deploy something in basically 90 days, whatever the timeline,
Right.
but in the armed forces, you do it. There's no complaining about it or, Hey, can I get more money? It's just this is your mission statement. Now you have to perform. And so this guy basically learned the product however he could. And got the best advice he could in the open market of ideas and then deployed it. And even though he didn't say ServiceNow in that, and in fact, it wasn't about ServiceNow, shows an agency of the same type.
Meaning like, yeah, SharePoint's got some stuff you have to learn about it, right? Maybe not as big as ServiceNow, but yeah, complicated.
Yep.
And scale. So he had to do a deployment for hundreds of people in X amount of days.
Right, right.
Who cares? Who cares what it actually was? He showed of the same scale, of the same type, and full agency. Like, he had to get it done.
Absolutely. So you establish right there, that baseline competence from that perspective, and then you add in, and these are the skills that I have in the thing that you actually own and are looking for. Right. Cause now you're layering on top off, right? Like I've done things like this in the past, and this is my skillset with this thing you want me to do in the future.
To me it's of a type, right? no, it's not exactly ServiceNow, but, who would you rather? Would you rather somebody who maybe Has gone through the courses, maybe even done a year of field work under somebody else's tutelage, or do you want somebody who can fill in the technical blanks, but has been in the hot seat for delivering something?
Yeah,
that's, I think, a clear advantage that mature workers have, If you're coming in from a 10 year career or a 20 year career somewhere else, you have been in a trench fight,
you know, you know, Duke, I don't think we can underscore this enough, right? Because there are life lessons, work lessons, work skills, right? That agency component.
There are these things that are the same no matter what, or there are these things that add to your competency and a, any position that you're in, they're typically, what are called soft skills, which I'm starting to not necessarily like the term soft skills, because I feel like it, it diminishes, the importance of them a little bit. the soft skills that we talk about are just as important as the hard skills that we talk about.
But we give them a little bit, more marginalized importance in the conversation, right? It is really, really important, right? That you have a personality to be able to discuss things with your user community, right? Like, that's what we call a soft skills. It's just as important as being able to write code, right? Because how are you going to get the requirements if you can't talk to people? So anyway, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of losing my track here. It's been a minute, duke. It's been a
Yeah. Yeah. We've got to cross reference this with all the different types of jobs in the ServiceNow community too. So you may be gunning for that dev position, But if you have priors that are any level of development, you use those priors.
Yes, that's what I was trying to say.
You know, I hit lotto. I started service now, 15 years ago, I still miss the opportunity to buy it. 20,
man. Me too. Yep.
like at that time. And I both right. Magic total service desk.
Yes,
And I had come off of a few years of that. So it was like, no, it's not service. Now it doesn't even look, act or feel like service now, but it was of the same type,
Yeah.
and I tell and tasks and assignments and work. And so,
And customization, right?
And so that made it easy for me to start the service now world with five years experience, basically.
Yep. Jumped right in.
Yep, so if you're going for the tech stuff, you have to use your past tech stuff as your stepping stone. Now, it's not just saying, well, I did that. For God's sakes, don't just put SharePoint as a single word bullet point on your skills list on a resume, right? Tell us what you did with it. And I think you've heard us say it about a hundred times. That XYZ protocol by doing X, I achieved Y as measured by Z. I don't care if you could say the word SharePoint.
I don't care if you can go down the SharePoint's navigator bar and name the stuff. What I want to know is what you did with SharePoint, like the guy I was just talking about where, you learned SharePoint and deployed it to hundreds of people in 120 days.
Yes. And then what did they do with it? Right. Right. Cause that's the, cause that's the next step, right? I learned it. I deployed it so that they can do. Right. And then now you've got a clue. Now you have a complete picture of the skill set that was involved in that particular project, and you can relate that to whatever it is that you're looking to hire someone for, right? this could be anything, right? Like you'd be a chef, right?
If you're a chef running a kitchen, those are your leadership skills. You are calm under pressure, right? You are very, very good at stretching a dollar,
Mm
There are all of these things that when you start thinking about, the jobs that you held and, from a more calculating, appraising perspective of the skill sets that are required to be good at them, you start to realize that a lot of these skill sets. Are interchangeable across a lot of different industries.
hmm. Something just popped into my head. When I was interviewing Travis Tolson for Titans of Now, back when I was doing that,
Shout out Travis.
Dev Advocate Travis Tolson, Senior Dev Advocate Travis Tolson.
That's right. Absolutely.
When I was interviewing him for Titans, he talked a lot about, his job when he was in the Marines, right? And how he wished they had something like ServiceNow, and how much better it would have made his life in the Marine Corps. And That is another good strategy. Sometimes the problem is I'm not getting to the interviews, but sometimes the problem is I'm at the interviews and I can't get through.
That might be a good strategy to take with you into an interview is talk about how you wished you had service now for. Those things in your past life,
Oh, that's good.
because then it goes without saying that you understand the ServiceNow value prop.
Right?
It also hints that, you know enough about the component pieces that you can assemble them in your mind to apply to a use case. Nobody else has seen before.
I didn't think about it that way, but that is absolutely a good way of phrasing it, right? I'm going to tell you what I would have done if I had the thing because everybody in this room, no service now. You could talk to use cases that you actually lived and layer on service now on top of it.
And now the understanding of the platform that you have starts to shine through because you're talking about things that you know about, things that you're comfortable with, things that you are competent in, right? And things that you've already done. You've basically changed the focus of the interview from what would you do if you were here to this is what I would have done if I had here then
Yeah, it shows more agency too, because the least amount of agency is we're telling you what to do and how to do it
right.
The second least is we're telling you what you need to do But if you have even more agency on top of that, you're volunteering Here's what I would do in a scenario. You're not even bringing up
Right.
So it shows the agency that you can go after problems proactively.
Yes. Yes. I'm highlighting problems. I'm highlight. I know the tool that that we have and I'm going to yeah, absolutely man. Absolutely. It's funny because I think after so many years in the workforce, you start to do these things intrinsically without thinking about them
Mm
sometimes though, I feel like not everyone does. It's a couple of things that I've thought about over the last couple of months one of them is that, there's a phrase, all common sense ain't common. Right? And
Yeah.
right,
Right.
And so you have to remember that just because you think it's common sense doesn't mean that everyone else shares the same thoughts on that. The other thing is, talked to a lot of people who have consulting, skill sets, right?
Consultative approaches, mentalities, workflow processes, all this stuff in their head as a matter of course, they have the ability to talk to people, they have the ability to step back from that and get technical, they have the ability to put all these things together and think from a process and a project and a program all these various different angles, right? And they just do this intrinsically, It's just part of the job of being a consultant.
I sometimes forget that not everyone is a consultant, right? There's a lot of folks who have never consulted before. And so when you are dealing with a situation like consultants often deal with irate clients, right. And we know how to manage that down to a level of conversation again, You often forget that not everyone has had that experience, Not everyone intrinsically gets how to do that. And I guess my point in all of this is that.
These things are things that I've always taken as like second nature. Right? Like it's just stuff that happens, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm going to take all this experience that I've had when I used to build data centers or whatever and apply it to service now, right? Because that's just what I do. But not everybody does that. And, it's just worth mentioning that meet people where they are, right? Especially when they come to you for guidance and mentorship.
That was a long way of saying that.
Still needs to be said, right? this question still gets asked. And if it's not being asked, you can still see. You can just read on your resumes. And it practically screams it.
Yeah.
There's a reason why this episode isn't as smooth and silky as some of our other ones. Cause it's still working out in my head, the vital essence of it. And as we're talking here, it's coming into my head that it's agency, scale, and What's a good word for of a type, of the same type, of a similar type?
Um, pattern matching.
Yeah, it's like Well, no, I haven't worked on ServiceNow, but I, maybe I worked on SAP or maybe I worked in Salesforce, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Your brain is like, no, they're not the same tool, but
Right.
they're components are of equal complexity ish.
Yes.
and then the scale, right? Oh, deployed for five people deployed for a hundred people deployed for a thousand people, like multi million dollar project, multi thousand dollar project. Mm
True. True. you need to make sure that you're aligning, when you're building your service down instance that you're aligning with people who have the who have matching scale, skill sets. If you're building a 50, 000 user ServiceNow instance, you probably don't want the person that's only ever did 20 user implementations. Right?
Yeah, but and it's like the person who's done 20 might know they'd be great people to have in combination with each other. Right? Because once you truly understand the scale and type of the problem, you almost start favoring people that have had similar. Type and scale of problem, even in lieu of some of the technical specifics,
Yes.
we've said this before. if you imagine being the CEO of a company,, the resume is really talk about the bottom lines. And you still get people who go from whole different industries because maybe I'm not an engineer, but I'm going to take the lead of this car company because. I did marketing that did the bottom line in a certain way, or HR in a certain way that moved the bottom line so much.
I think it does. I think it does, Duke. You know, I think it's sometimes the skill set that you need might not be the skill set that you asked for. I think that's what you're saying.
Yeah, that's true. I'll try to do another example. There's this guy was Air Force, but he was basically in charge of some significant portion of like fighter craft, right? The maintenance of
right?
And so. He's basically talking about asset management but in the scale of billions of dollars And it just not want not wants to write billion in the resume, right?
Oh, wow.
It was
That's a
yeah, it's like this kind of leadership title in Management. It's like, no dude, you're in charge of billions of dollars worth of our nation's tip of the spear, that's super important. And course that can parlay Into the ServiceNow realm.
Right.
And so again, you have to think about what is the scale of the thing that I have did? What is the type of the thing that I've done? What was the complexity of the thing that I've done? Because you could take all of that and make yourself, super attractive in the ServiceNow world. How far off is that from really understanding asset management, IT asset management? Right.
not very right. If you've done asset management in any form, you can pick that up and bring it over. And if you've done it, at a large scale these things are definitely interchangeable. And I don't know to Duke, right? I think there's not enough emphasis put on understanding and delivering and building the processes. That often drive the technical build outs that companies want, right? Because, just being real, right?
I don't talk tech with my clients most of the time because they didn't hire me to write code. They hired me because they had a problem that is expressed in the form of a process that needs to be fixed, or implement it or praised. or understood, whatever it is, right? That's how they communicate with me. Hey, our incident management process sucks, we can't get incidents closed within a week. We've got a backlog of 17, 000 incidents open that we're never going to be able to even address.
All of these things, like they're not saying, Hey these UI actions on my incident management process sucks. Right. Can you make sure that they're doing, call the scripted clues instead of, running glide record lookups, synchronously. Right. They don't say, they don't say that. I just think we don't give enough emphasis to on that. It's not always the tech, even though folks are asking you for the tech.
There's a lot of value and some of the other stuff that you have that even if you're light on the tech, if you're heavy on some of the other stuff that you're doing. And you can convince the person interviewing you that, that really matters, then there you go. Right? So don't sell that stuff short.
will put some of the links for some of the job for the jobs. In the ServiceNow world, in the description, so you gotta know what you're aiming for, but just know that you just can't understate your background. If you're coming from a past career in something, it's got transferable skills, and I guess another way to, to, to, Come to this too is like everything boils down to time and money, right?
Yeah,
Time, money, and maybe risk. And those are like other ways of saying money too, I guess. So in so far as you're able, try and get to the point where you saved time, or you saved money, as best as you can.
I think that's a good idea, too. these are just skills that translate no matter what industry you're in. Right? And, and because of that you can actually, um. They, they are good skills that everyone is looking for and look, let's be honest. Nobody writes really good job descriptions in any way.
Not even. Yeah, I can't remember the last time I saw a really good job description. Hey, there's another example I want to bring up. I'm sure we put it on one of our other episodes. Some of these are starting to blend in together. But,
We've done a few.
yeah, there's one. If I said it once, I'm sorry, I'll say it again. If you imagine that Jeff Bezos is like, Hey, listen, I got my bag. I don't have to worry about running amazon anymore And he just throws a dart at a dark board with all kinds of jobs on it He decides. Oh, yeah service now admin. I'll see what I can do like that.
Yeah. Yep.
would you hire? Jeff Bezos or some other ServiceNow admin candidate. I'll tell you what I would do. I would hire Jeff Bezos in a second. Even knowing that he's got no ServiceNow priors, none.
Okay.
You know just from watching his career that he has had to solve like infinitely complex technology issues, people issues, operation issues. He knows how to get it done. And he can tell you exactly, I'm sure that guy's can fill a month worth of beer nights on stories of crazy stuff that he saved Amazon through. And so I want that for my team
That's a good point.
and he'll like. We just know through what he's done that he can figure out the rest of it. Not everybody's Jeff Bezos, obviously,
I get you. I mean, you're basically saying, would you take somebody who has a track record of amazing success, even though they don't have experience in the industry that you're hiring from for, or the job that you're hiring for, or would you not hire that person and then go after someone who has the specific experience in the technology that you're hiring for, but does not have the same amazing track record of success.
And I do think, from that perspective is an easy, easy, easy decision, right? you give me somebody who has on their resume. I did this, I did that, I did this, I did that. Right. These were all successful. Like you, here's my references, call them up. They'll tell you how amazing I am. Right. And all of that stuff is in, automotive industry. Right. And you're hiring for a service now developer and they say, I can, I don't know it yet. But this is my track record of success.
I will know it by the time you need me to, right?
think we got to be careful about going from zero I think we'd be hard pressed to find somebody who would go right from the mechanic shop right into the service now admin position because you need a little bit of the tech stuff. But that that stuff is going to wash out in the interview anyway.
I don't know man here I mean I often think to myself like what would I be doing if I wasn't doing this and I think I'd be a mechanic and the Reason I say that is because of all the troubleshooting and problem solving that mechanics have to do right that
I don't think I don't think you could walk in even as good as you are is explaining your service now value propositions. Right? You couldn't walk into a mechanic shop and just say, like, Hey, make me billable tomorrow. Right? So there's still,
I couldn't do that.
but with a little bit, like, maybe you go to a mechanic school, whatever mechanics do to become mechanics, right? Maybe you do that and you come out fresh there, but then you like parlaying your past service. Now, value, all I'm saying is these are like force multipliers versus replacements for hard technical skill, and it's aimed at those people who, maybe they've gone to the next gen program, or maybe they've done a year of working as a service now resource somewhere. They're trying to get.
Deeper in, they're trying to sound more compelling and they happen to have a little bit more background that they could rely on.
Absolutely, man. I think that makes a whole lot of sense. Right? and no, I definitely couldn't be a mechanic, but this this sleep at a holiday Inn last night, but Duke, we're at 36 minutes record. Keep going or you want to wrap?
no, I think we'll wrap it up here and maybe it's a shorter episode, but,
would this be a short episode? Like it's been a while and how long do we typically record?
45 minutes.
Oh shit. Let's keep going then
I don't know if I have anything else. I think just getting back into the swing of things, right?
Yeah, all right
Ring, ring rust is real, my friend.
bro, like i'm over like it's like all right. Yeah. All right. How do you talk? Uh, I mean, it's
we were cracking these things out like once a week, sometimes even twice a week. And then it was just like I went right into that into post production and the same night I published and now it's just like wow.
We have recorded twice in a day before and now it's like, whoa, whoa, it is, it is real, but, it feels good to get back in the saddle, right? to talk about these things again and to get back out here, you know, I
more episodes to come and hey, if you got an idea just put it into whatever chat you see this episode posted on. And I guess we'll see you on the next one.
hollow.