In this episode, Mike Gardon chats with Mike Podesto. Mike Podesto is the CEO & Founder of Find My Profession, Inc. After years in sales and recruiting roles, Mike knew that it was time to begin his journey with Find My Profession. On October 3rd, 2015 Find My Profession was born. The inspiration came from a lack of satisfaction in the recruiting industry and the huge need for help on the job seeker side. Having job candidates come second and hiring managers come first always seemed backward. With more “recruiting rules” than ever, Find My Profession evens the playing field by using their recruiting knowledge to benefit job seekers. With the job seeker in mind, Mike quit his job as a recruiting manager to devote his full attention to providing a solution exclusively for job seekers.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
- Mike’s background and career journey
- How Mike came up with the idea for Find My Profession
- Steps Mike took to make a career change
- How Mike knew it was time for him to transition to Find My Profession full-time
- Ways that Mike generated supplemental income while building Find My Profession
- Reverse recruiting - what it is and what it means at Find My Profession
- What can people expect when working with Find My Profession
HELP US OUT!
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BOOKS AND RESOURCES:
- Find My Profession is a fully managed job search site
- They search for jobs for clients, they apply to jobs that clients have approved, they tailor resumes, they network on customer’s behalf, etc.
- Mike Podesto recommends taking time to network on LinkedIn
- Follow Mike on LinkedIn and his website.
Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.
Mike Gardon (00:00):
Hello, and welcome back. You're listening to CareerCloud Radio, and this is your host Michael Gardon. I've got a great guest for you today. Mike Podesto is the CEO and founder of Find My Profession. After years in sales and recruiting roles, Mike knew it was time to begin his journey with Find My Profession. The inspiration came from a lack of satisfaction in the recruiting industry and the huge need for help on the job seeker side. Having job candidates come second and hiring managers come first, always seem backwards to Mike. Find My Profession, even the playing field by using their recruiting knowledge to benefit job seekers with the job seeker in mind might quit his job as a recruiting manager to devote his full attention to providing a solution exclusively for job seekers, which he calls reverse recruiting. In this episode, we talk about Mike's early career dissatisfaction, how he kept his dream business alive as a side hustle, eventually bootstrapping it to a full-time business. And finally, what Find My Profession is and how its unique model is helping job seekers find the right role and ease the burden of jobs of the job search process. Without further ado, here is my amazing conversation with Mike Podesto. Mike, welcome to the show. Great to have you
Mike Podesto (01:13):
Thanks so much for having me Mike honor, to be here.
Mike Gardon (01:16):
Great. Yeah, really interested to get into all of the things that you've been doing with fine, my profession and all of those things, how you're helping people get into great jobs and find the, the work that they kind of have a calling for. But I also love to talk about people's career arcs. I'm fascinated with the career stories. So I'm just gonna open it up to talk to you about and ask you the first question, which is, you know, when you were in college and you were kind of preparing for a career, what did you think you would be doing for a living at this point in your life?
Mike Podesto (01:49):
Yeah, so I had wanted to be a stock broker a few years before getting into college and then all the way through college until my senior year, I had just witnessed family friend who was a stock broker seemed to have a nice lifestyle, got to spend time with his family and kids and did pretty well financially. So that was always what I thought I wanted to do. Yeah.
Mike Gardon (02:10):
Okay. And that's clearly not what you're doing today. How did things unfold after college?
Mike Podesto (02:16):
Yeah, so my senior year, uh, we were required to do an internship for our field of study. So I did a little internship at a financial kind of consulting firm that did, you know, uh, basically stock insurance and things like that after doing that, I really just decided it wasn't for me. I didn't enjoy it too much. And I also didn't really care to go back to school essentially and pass a whole bunch of exams after graduating to get licensed for that. I had a lot of experience in sales throughout college and thought, you know, I really enjoy a position where I can work harder to make more money versus just being kind of capped, um, in a role and having to spend, you know, X number of years to get to that next level. So sales is what I ultimately decided to go into after college. And that's what led me to, to recruiting.
Mike Gardon (03:03):
Okay. I guess I have kind of like a idea of like stock brokers as being somewhat salespeople. So was there anything in particular about the difference that I should know about or think about, you know, that affected your decision?
Mike Podesto (03:16):
Yeah. So there was quite a bit more schooling that went into it after that. I just wasn't super interested in doing, but also it was not really exciting for me to be selling insurance and things of that nature. So, um, while I feel like I could have done well and, and lived a successful life, it just going out and, and having meetings on the golf course and things like that, wasn't really what I was looking for. Um, and I realized that pretty much after I was done getting my finance degree. So I just decided to, to go through with it, finish it, get that degree and then go out and pursue something that I'd be a little more passionate about.
Mike Gardon (03:53):
Okay. So yeah, drawn to the sales as an industry, but kind of need, you kind of had the need to have a passion and an interest in what you were selling essentially, right?
Mike Podesto (04:05):
Yeah. Never been a big, uh, suit tie guy either. So you know, the job where I'd have to dress up in a suit and tie every day was not, not for me.
Mike Gardon (04:13):
So yeah, Meer, luckily I can, you know, kind of wear a sweatshirt every day and a, a hat. I I'm a big hat guy for some reason. So I'm always,
Mike Podesto (04:36):
Yeah, sure. Um, I was recruited in college my senior year for a staffing role. I had a couple opportunities locally, but I really wanted to get out of Fresno, California, if you're familiar with it, you'd know why I wanted to get out, but they call it the armpit of California for a reason. It gets like 115 degrees in the summer and it's just brutal. So I was excited to get out and start kind of new journey somewhere else. I had this role where a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn to work as a recruiter in the bay area. Um, I thought that was pretty exciting. Um, moving to a, a bigger city in California where there's more opportunity. So that's really what led me to my first recruiting job in San Jose that did not last long. I quickly realized that was not something that I was interested in.
Mike Podesto (05:24):
Either my employer, uh, will not mention the name, but was not the most ethical company around it. They were very focused on, you know, high volume recruiting, no quality, just quantity. There's the highest turnover rate that I've ever seen at a company there. I mean, every single month, if not multiple times a month, somebody was quitting and then somebody else was being hired. So I was one of those people as well, only lasted there about three months before wanting to go out and try to do something on my own, in the same space, a little better than they were doing.
Mike Gardon (05:57):
How did that, I guess, maybe differ from other recruiting and staffing models. I've talked to other recruiters who seem to have a much more sort of approach that's actually helpful, but I think your experience was really one that it was all about the sales goals. People kind of were really skipping over the, the human element of the job seeker in the whole deal. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Mike Podesto (06:22):
Yeah, sure. I mean our hiring manager, wasn't too concerned about us building relationships with the job seekers that we were working with. A lot of recruiting agencies will kind of implement an aspect of coaching as well, where their kind of coaching their job seeker clients or not really clients, but coaching the job seekers to help position them better for interviews. Things like that. Our manager did not want us really interacting with the job seekers at all, besides getting information to see if they qualify and then sending them over to the hiring manager. We're pretty much just told to kind of neglect it or not really care for any of the job seekers and to put all of our focus and attention on the hiring companies and the hiring managers, which to some extent that makes sense. They're the ones who are paying the bills and keeping the lights on. But I just realized that wasn't for me, when I got into recruiting, I thought it would be more of a focus on helping job seekers get jobs. And that really wasn't the focus at all. And I wanted to go do that elsewhere. So,
Mike Gardon (07:17):
Okay. So kind of a desire to really service the people who are kind of in need the most, the people that are looking for the job led you to really not only leave that position after a short stint, but you found your passion, at least in that industry in terms of wanting to help people. And the next step for you was, was basically what
Mike Podesto (07:39):
Yeah it did. I saw a huge need when I was working there, we talked to, you know, probably a hundred people a day making phone calls to see if somebody's a fit and maybe one out of those hundred would be somebody that we'd pass along to the hiring manager. And I always wondered, you know, what is happening to the other 99 out of a hundred that were essentially ignoring and neglecting, where are they going? How are they getting help? And it wasn't until I started really job searching myself when I was unhappy with the recruiting job that I realized, wow, job searching is difficult. I remember getting off work after 10 hour work days, plus an hour commute each way really didn't have a lot of time to be job searching. So I remember sitting on my computer and Googling, can I just pay somebody to find me a job, or can I hire a company that will find me a job?
Mike Podesto (08:21):
And I couldn't find anything out there on the internet. I mean, I literally would've walked into Google's front door and said, here's a $10,000 check, hire me. You know, I'll pay you to hire me. And that wasn't an option. There's nothing like that. Nobody was willing to take my money to help me get a job. And I really didn't have time with this full-time job to job search on my own effectively. So with the combined experience of recruiting and wanting to help the job seekers and then also being a job seeker and realizing there really isn't a lot of help out there for job seekers. That's what led to the inspiration for Find My Profession and our fully managed job search service, um, where we pretty much managed the job search for our clients.
Mike Gardon (09:02):
Okay. So that's, that was kinda like the key insight, right? Like you yourself, you're kind of scratching your own niche. Like you had this need to, it is a full-time job finding a job as a full-time job. And you said, Hey, like I would love to do this and pay money for it. And it just doesn't seem to exist. So that's kind of like, Ooh, the light bulb went off in Mike's head as to maybe there's a better way to do this and I don't find it in the marketplace. So I'm gonna go try to build that on my own. Right.
Mike Podesto (09:31):
Absolutely. Yeah. I think they say like a lot of, or most businesses come out of some need that somebody had, you know, and then it sparks that creativity. That was absolutely the case here with me. It was me having to choose what I wanted to sacrifice to be able to job search after work. So was I not cooking dinner that night and eating out, or was I not going to the gym that night and eating out or was I job searching? It was very limited time. I could do things before I had to get up at four in the morning to commute to work the next day. So yeah, there's a service for just about everything out there that you could possibly want. I thought, you know, why is there not a service to help people job search?
Mike Gardon (10:06):
Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I've changed careers, like complete change of career several times. And I remember, I remember being in grad school and working for the graduate department to pay for the school
Mike Podesto (11:03):
And how long did that take you to do all that networking and stuff on your own?
Mike Gardon (11:07):
Like, let me think. So like start to finish. I did my MBA program at kind of an accelerated pace I did about a year and a quarter where normally it's kind of a two year process and I was a full time student working student. And so I would say like I started right away. I wasn't going to take a job until I was done. So maybe I had a little bit of extra time, but yeah, I mean, it was like a good year process of, there was some added time because I wasn't laser focused in on what I wanted to do. So I had some time to sort of the front end of that I think was loaded more with exploration than anything else. And then probably, you know, six months when I was sort of dialed into what I wanted to do. So yeah. I mean, it was long
Mike Podesto (11:55):
Mike Gardon (12:10):
Yeah. So yeah, so I, I can see the problem, like the burning problem there. I wanna kind of talk to you about like that transition because a lot of our audience is listening and thinking about doing something different and maybe they're not quite sure exactly how to do that or take the next steps. So I kind of wanna hone in a little bit on like the steps you took. So you got the idea, you don't like your employer, you know, you need to make a change. What was like maybe the first few weeks, or few months of that transition? Like, what were you doing? What was the first step you took?
Mike Podesto (12:40):
Yeah, so I not like a multiple business starter entrepreneur, this was my first business. So I was not ready to just, you know, have the idea as a concept and then just make the leap and quit my job right away. I know I've heard a couple of your other, you know, episodes and you don't necessarily recommend that either for most people. Right? So I didn't, I decided to continue working. I did leave the recruiting job, ended up getting a software or sales job moved to San Francisco. Super high rent is paying $1,500 a month to live in a house with four other roommates and basically eating, eating ramen and frozen pizzas every day. So I was not ready to quit my job and just pursue this full time. I did it on the side, spend maybe 10 hours a week building the website, just kind of getting proof of concept, throwing some Google ads out there to try to get some clients and see what people thought about the service.
Mike Podesto (13:35):
Just getting feedback, um, at a super low cost while having my full time job financially support me. It wasn't until probably about a year of doing this on the side that I decided it was time to quit my job and pursue this full time to do that. I still couldn't afford to live in San Francisco paying 1500 a month for rent. I figured out basically what my, my burn rate would be and how long I'd be able to last and discovered that I needed to move and have a lower rent and lower cost of living to be able to pursue this full time. So I ended up moving to a much more authority, reduced my rent to $400 from $1,500 and also, you know, had roommates and was, was toughen it out. Uh, like that, that's kind of how it started. Um, I
Mike Gardon (14:18):
Got a couple follow up questions in there. So, so first I just wanted, I wanted to point out like you were in a, a tough employment situation and you didn't go straight to starting your little baby
Mike Podesto (14:59):
Yeah, definitely. It was, you know, you never know what's gonna come of something, but you know, if you're like, in my case was just interested in starting something kind of being an entrepreneur, having my own journey with that and wanted to see what would happen. So yeah, definitely was, was a side hustle really originally did not think I would be leaving software sales, which was kind of my dream job for the last few years. So yeah. It ended up, ended up happening like that.
Mike Gardon (15:25):
Okay. And then what was maybe like the key insight or the switch that flipped for when you kind of said, yeah, I, I should do this full time or I need to do this full time. Like, what did you see that helped you get the confidence to make that leap then?
Mike Podesto (15:39):
Yeah, so I saw, we were starting to get some interests, some customers organically coming to us, and I found myself having to try to answer phone calls during, you know, business hours is when people would be calling for the business, but I was also working a full time job then. Um, I knew my employer wouldn't love that too much. I didn't have a super great flexible job at the time. It was very much a in office 10 hours, a day, long hours job, if it would've been a, a nice, flexible part-time career, I probably could have managed both for longer, but there's really no way I could just continue a 60 hour work week, be getting calls for my business and then not answering them and essentially neglecting my little baby for my full-time job. It was just never gonna go any further. It seemed like, um, if I didn't allocate some more time for it,
Mike Gardon (16:26):
So, okay. So you kind of reached a point where you had a constraint, which is essentially time and attention to your full-time job. It wasn't as flexible as you maybe needed it to be. And so it sort of forced the decision. How did you manage, I guess, the risk then of going forward with your pursuing your, your business full time then, because you obviously would drop income, right? How did you manage that little situation?
Mike Podesto (16:55):
Yeah. I went from a 90,000 base salary with lots of commission on top of that to probably making closer to 20 grand a year. My first year of starting Find My Profession. So that required a huge decrease in expenses. Right. So went from a $1,500 a month house to a $400 a month apartment. Um, actually went and stayed at my parents' house for three months prior to moving into that apartment. Remember calling my dad on my last day of work and saying, Hey, I know I just got this job. And it's like a great job. And like everything I've been working towards, but I think I wanna quit and do my business full time. And I thought he was gonna say, you know, you're stupid, don't do that. Um, but he was totally supportive. He said, Hey, you know, if that's what you think is best, I support it, go for it. He was like, if you need to come stay here for a couple months, till you get on your feet, you can, um, I took them up on that, ended up moving back, which is not something a recent college grad wants to do is go and live after being out for the last six years helpful. And it was what needed to do to move and yeah, that's what I had to.
Mike Gardon (18:04):
Yeah. So just in expenses and getting your personal kind of finances in order, did you do anything else to supplement income or, uh, was all that income from the business from Find My Profession to start?
Mike Podesto (18:17):
Yeah, no. So I had a little bit saved maybe like $5,000 probably within the first month really doing Find My Profession the full time we, I decided, okay, we need a website that looks good. I had built the previous website on my spare time and I am in no way a software developer. So it was pretty terrible. Um, ended up going on Upwork to find some freelancers and found a team out of Ukraine that was gonna charge $15,000 to build this, you know, dream website of mine considering I had five and was maybe making one to 2000 a month from Find My Profession. Um, I needed to come up with 10 grand in basically it was one and a half months that they were gonna be done with the project and I was having to pay incrementally throughout, so to supplement and try to get that income.
Mike Podesto (19:04):
I went on Upwork myself and started freelance blog writing. I was charging $25 an hour, which was a lot less than I was making before, but it did give me that freedom and flexibility to still be able to focus on Find My Profession during business hours when people were calling. And I could write blogs at night early in the morning and make what I needed to make. And if to do the math on basically $20 an hour after the Upwork fees to get to $10,000 in a month and a half, I was easily working 60 to a hundred hour weeks for the first few months of starting the business.
Mike Gardon (19:38):
Wow. So that's so interesting. Yeah. You, I didn't realize you used freelancing kind to supplements. Where did the writing come from? Cause obviously software sales. A lot of times I talk to people and I say, Hey, if, if you wanna start a business, like the easiest way to start is do what your job pays you to do. Right. Go get one more client. Now you're a freelancer. But like you kind of went from sales to writing. How did you discover you had a, had a skill for writing?
Mike Podesto (20:05):
Yeah. So the funny thing is I absolutely hate writing blogs and articles and just writing in general. I really, it was a means to an end, but I I've always been a good writer. I just never liked it. I got a four on my AP English test in high school. Didn't have to take English in college because I tested out of it and was always good at writing. I noticed on Upwork, there really was just a need for administrative people, which most people in the us were hiring people in other countries for those sorts of things or software development, which there's no way I was gonna learn that or be able to do that in writing. There's still a lot of outsourced writing, but a lot of people were looking for us writers and would pay a decent amount because, um, typically the writing quality was a little higher.
Mike Podesto (20:49):
So ended up just thinking, okay, this is probably the one thing on Upwork that I could make money on. Also have the time flexibility, even a lot of administrative stuff you have to be on during that person's business hours to do work for them. I just like that. Writing seemed to be one of the few options that I could do whenever I wanted could make enough doing, despite hating it. I knew this was not what I was gonna do forever. So it was fine to just suck it up and deal with it for a couple months.
Mike Gardon (21:16):
What was your area of expertise
Mike Podesto (21:18):
For writing? So I wrote blogs. My biggest client was actually an online head shop. So they had me writing reviews on different basically pipes and bongs and things like that, which is not my forte, but it was, uh, it's pretty funny work. The guys were really cool that ran the shop and, and super friendly and paid me well and liked what I did. The other biggest client was a, a staffing firm out of Florida. So wrote a lot of recruiting and HR blogs as well as blogs for online and online head shop.
Mike Gardon (21:47):
Fascinating. Okay. That's amazing.
Mike Podesto (22:10):
Yeah. I kept my expenses low enough where really the only reason I needed a freelance was to support the growth that we were trying to do, which was, um, updating the website, everything else I was doing on my own from there, all the marketing, working with the clients, I was fine doing that and just not making a lot. So I stayed in that apartment at the $400 a month for like a year and a half, even though only about the first three months of it was freelancing. So I kept my expenses super low. Eventually the expenses, you know, the, the money from the business, um, far outweighed the expenses, but I still, I still kept them very low for a while just to be safe and planned for any additional growth or development that needed to happen.
Mike Gardon (22:49):
Got it. Okay. Uh, what, what time period was this? This was approximately what year?
Mike Podesto (22:54):
So would've been early 2016 where all this was was wrapping up. Okay.
Mike Gardon (22:59):
All right. Awesome, man. I, I love that story. I love these, uh, career transition stories and how people do it and how people execute. It is fantastic. It gets me pumped. So we've been talking a lot. We've been mentioning, Find My Profession. We've been talking about your story, but I wanna get into that right now. I want our audience to understand what you do, cuz you obviously have a passion for this space. You started it from scratch. You saw a need. What do you guys actually do? How do you stand out? I wanna get into all of this stuff.
Mike Podesto (23:28):
Yeah. So pharma profession was originally founded, just focusing on our, what we now call reverse recruiting services. So it's our fully managed job search. Um, we mentioned that I saw the need earlier on where, you know, somebody could just hire somebody to find a job for them fully. There's a lot of resume writers and career coaches out there, which are great resources, but they don't do everything for not gonna make it where you don't have to come home after a 60 hour work week and still do work on your computer. Once you have that resume, there's still a lot of work involved. I wanted something that was start to end a full service for job seekers to literally outsource their job search. So our career founder service has just grown and evolved into what it is today, but we will search for jobs for our clients.
Mike Podesto (24:13):
We present to them, these jobs, every Friday, new jobs added into their profile. They either approve or reject the jobs that we've added for them. On Monday, we apply to all the jobs that they've approved. We use a customized version of their resume, tailored towards the job for every job that we apply to for them. And then Tuesday through Thursday, we network on their behalf. So we're literally going into their LinkedIn profile and an email account that is theirs and sending messages to hiring managers, recruiters, and peers for the roles that they're interested in on their behalf to set up interviews. And then once we land them interviews, we coach them through how to be successful in that.
Mike Gardon (24:51):
Got it. So very comprehensive white glove type service. And I love what you, you call you call it reverse recruiting, right? Why is it called reverse recruiting
Mike Podesto (25:00):
Mike Gardon (25:39):
I love that. It's fantastic. Who would you say is like, who is this primarily for? Like, what is the archetype of a person that uses your service?
Mike Podesto (25:48):
Yeah, so we have worked with just about anybody. I mean, we worked with recent college graduates whose parents are buying this as a gift for them. And we've worked with seven figure executives looking for, you know, very high C level positions. So we can work with just about anybody considering, you know, the cost of the service in close to 2,500 a month. It is, you know, somewhat of an inhibitor for those making under 60 grand a year or so, but we are capable of working with anybody and we are extremely successful working with anybody. The cost would be the only limiting factor for people.
Mike Gardon (26:24):
Yeah. And so, I mean, what's unique is this is funded by the job seeker as opposed to the, the job posters or the employers. Right. And you don't take any money from an employer as I understand it. Right?
Mike Podesto (26:38):
Yeah. So we found that if we're trying to pitch our clients to employers and then charge a fee, we're not really having the best interest of the job seeker. The company's less likely to look at our clients if they think that they have to pay some huge 30% of the salary placement fee attached to it. So we send all of our clients over as free referrals to hiring companies to better position them for success and be more likely to land them interviews. So yeah, unfortunately in order to be a hundred percent focused on the job seeker, their wants, needs, and desires and have no bias towards pushing them towards any companies or anything like that, we do need to be compensated by the job seeker to be fully vested in them.
Mike Gardon (27:18):
Yeah. That makes sense. Now. I mean, I, I'm assuming in the industry, you get a little pushback because most of the model of recruiting is, is employer funded. Essentially. You were telling me some of the stories when we talked the other day about, uh, you know, the letters that you get and the thanks that you get from people, it just felt to me like when a job seeker is paying for this service and getting the value out of it, that you guys are providing, you have kind of fans for life and you have like really good reviews. Talk to me a little bit about some of the things that people have said to you in the past.
Mike Podesto (27:54):
Yeah. I mean, anybody who's gone through a job search knows it can be a pretty emotional process. It's pretty stressful getting far along in an interview and then ultimately finding out that they're going with somebody else and you're the second option can be super depressing for people. It's nice to have somebody who's there with you going through the entire process, helping kind of absorb some of that, that pain and, and heartache and, and just knowing you're not alone out there. So yeah, we've had clients, you know, of course send us like bottles of champagne, all sorts of things like that, but even been invited to like weddings for clients. I mean, we've been told we've saved marriages that were going downhill because just financial stress in the family from not having a job at the time. I mean, there's so much that we've done for clients and, and yeah, once they use our service, they're pretty much ruined for the rest of their life because they see how convenient it is to have us do the work for them. And when another job search comes around, I don't personally know of a single client. Who's used our service and then conducted another job search and then not used us that second time because they are just like, wow, I can't ever do this again on my own. It was so much better with,
Mike Gardon (29:04):
That's amazing. The fact that you had invited to weddings and claim to have saved marriages is like, you're a marriage counselor. That's unbelievable. I mean, I, there's not, you know, I don't think a lot of, a lot of services or a lot of recruiting services and the other model probably can say that they probably can't say that. Right. Like it's very unique. It seems like we talked about your process. We talked about the things that, that you do for a job seeker. What can people expect from you so they can expect to have all of those jobs done, but in terms of like, what's the secret sauce in your culture or in how you treat your clients that sets you guys apart?
Mike Podesto (29:44):
Yeah. So from the beginning, we've just been designed to cater towards job seekers. There's like you said, you know, it's not that recruiters are bad people or anything. It's just that they're not compensated by the job seeker to be invested in them and focus on what their ones are that they have another agenda, which is to fill the positions for the hiring companies. So they can't be as focused on the job seeker as we, as we can. That's what we're literally hired and paid to do, not what recruiters are hired or expected to do. So our team members are super qualified. We do pretty much exclusively hire our reverse recruiters from recruiting backgrounds. We do want them to be familiar with the recruiting process, what HR and companies are looking for, but also be in the same situation as I was where they're thinking, I want to be doing something to help the job seeker more than I want to be doing to help the company. And we get people applying to this job just saying, wow, you know, this is exactly what I've been wanting to do my whole life, but didn't know anything out there existed. So the people that we have working with us and working for our job seeker clients are super motivated to help job seekers directly. That's what their passion is. And we just only hire people for this role that are very passionate about helping job seekers.
Mike Gardon (30:58):
Yeah. I mean, my audience on the podcast and in newsletters and in written form on career cloud.com know that I'm a big proponent of investing in ourselves and using money as a tool to leverage our time, solve problems, get things done better. And I do think this is a, an option for people. They may not have been a accustomed to like people aren't necessarily used to paying for that type of service. But I, I do think it falls in the clearly in that bucket of if you have it and you're able to solve this problem and leverage other people who know how to network better, who understand how to customize resumes, search for jobs better and faster than you like. This is a great way to use some money to do that and find a really, really topnotch fit job instead of settling and finding another job that maybe 60% is a good fit instead of 80 90%. And so that's why I wanted to have you on and talk about this, cuz I think it's a great way for people to do that. I want to give you the floor for the next minute or so. Like if there's just anything I missed asking you, anything that you wanna leave our audience with, it could be, you know, advice for trying to, uh, for somebody trying to figure out their path in life or just whatever you wanna do. I wanna just give you the floor and kind of say whatever you'd want to.
Mike Podesto (32:27):
Sure. Yeah. I mean, just to piggyback off what you're saying, like you said, job searching is a skill and it's not something that everybody should just be expected to be a pro at. I'm not a pro at software development and a software developer is probably not a pro at sales or finance. Um, so each person has their skill set their profession. Like you're a great podcast host, but I don't know if you're a great cook. So we don't expect our clients to be great job seekers. I mean, people probably look for a job 3, 4, 5 times in their life. So why invest the time and effort into becoming the most professional job seeker you could possibly be? It's just not something you do frequently enough to, to develop those skills. We have those skills, this is what we do full time for the past five, six years.
Mike Podesto (33:11):
So we can, you know, do this so much better than the average job seeker and it's, nobody should be expected to be a professional job seeker when they're only doing it a couple times a year. So we're happy to be those people for our clients and allow them to do what they do best, whether that's finance sales or whatever it's. So yeah, that's really it. I don't have too much else to say, I guess just, you know, advice whether or not you're using our services. Well, I guess net networking is huge. So whether this is for job searching or just starting something else that you can be more passionate about in life, whether you know, new career, whatever it is, LinkedIn's a great tool to find people to network with. That's how I got connected with Mike here. You can meet some great people on there that have similar goals and are like-minded individuals that can kind of help guide you through that and give you advice. So just like Mike show is just such a great resource for people to figure out their passion and their calling and know how to take actionable steps to getting there. There's so much out there like this. So definitely don't be afraid to network and get connected with people and, and keep learning.
Mike Gardon (34:13):
Yep. I'll second that I think your network is a little bit like a safety net and a launchpad at the same time, the world's uncertain. People are laid off, people get fired, I've had job changes, right. And I've always fallen back on my network. And so it's not just build it when you need it. It's always be building it. So you have it when you need it. And then on the launchpad side, I mean, it's amazing the serendipity that happens from just connecting with people online, building your network, you just never know what doors are gonna open when you truly build a network of value. So that's kind of gonna be my last statement.
Mike Podesto (34:59):
Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn. That's pretty much the only social platform that I'm active on. So just search Mike Podesto on LinkedIn. I'm pretty much the only one another great place to go is the website. Find My Profession.com a ton of information on there, tons of free career advice, resources, and we have the best customer success team, always available to answer the phone or emails, if you have any questions. So highly recommend Find My Profession as well.
Mike Gardon (35:22):
All right. Excellent. We'll have links to all that in the show notes, Mike, great conversation really appreciate you being here, buddy. Thank you very much.
Mike Podesto (35:30):
Thanks so much for having me have a good day.
Mike Gardon (35:32):
All right. You too.
Outro (35:33):
CareerCloud Radio is a production of CareerCloud.com. Please review this episode on iTunes. We really appreciate it a lot. And thank you for listening.
