Ep 7 - Talking with Jason Alba

Jason Alba
https://twitter.com/jasonalba

Jibber Jobber
https://www.jibberjobber.com/

Pluralsight Courses
https://pluralsight.com/profile/author/jason-alba

Greg Marine  
So you've landed your dream job, only to find out two months later, it wasn't such a dream after all. This week, I talked with Jason Alba, and he has some great advice to manage your career. Welcome to this week's episode of talking tech.

If you wouldn't mind, start off, introduce yourself and tell my listeners, who you are and what you do.

Jason Alba  
Hey, so thanks for having me on. My name is Jason Alba. And I do a number of things. When people ask me what I do. I usually say I don't know. Or it depends on the mood. And then I'll tell him I either Do you know my jibber jabber, which is a CRM for job seekers, or that I make courses for Pluralsight or that I'm an entrepreneur, I, I have a lot, a lot of plates spinning that I work on. So that's me in a nutshell.

Greg Marine  
Very cool. And it's interesting, your analogy of the spinning plates. I've heard that quite a bit this year. It's a crazy year. So a lot of people are spinning new plates.

Jason Alba  
Yeah, oh my gosh, I mean, I'm talking to people who, you know, you go to a, you go to an A work at an office, right. So you commute you have, you have podcast time, on the way there you have unwind time on the way back, and then you go into whatever family environment you're in. And, and kids or if you have kids, you know, if you have a family and kids and they're, you know, they're they're at school, and they have homework, and then they have friends to hang out with. And now you know, since March or April, or may or whenever you started your quarantine, you're working at home, trying to figure out how to have a good connection and the right technology, right? Your kids are at home, and and they're tugging at you saying hey, I can't get on my zoom class, can you help me? Or you know, or they're, or you watch them on their zoom class. And they're like doing acrobats and not even paying attention? Exactly. They can't play with their friends, you know, the whole world has shifted from everybody being able to do what they're used to being able to do to oh my gosh, I need to play, you know, both sets of parents and teacher and babies. I mean, and I still have to have a career and a job. It's been just an amazing amount of stress and change for the average person.

Greg Marine  
Sure. And with that stress and change, they have to be very flexible. Because it's an evolutionary process. There's, it's constantly changing. We're

Jason Alba  
constantly changing. And then, you know, things that are weighing on people's minds are, I just lost my job, but nobody's hiring or, you know, 660 percent of my department just got let go. What does that mean, for me? Is the writing on the wall? And I'm going to be let go soon? Or am I going to be covering everybody else's work? And you know, it's, it's been a crazy year, it's been, and I mean, I've had a good year. But I totally recognize that. I mean, there's been some good stuff that's come out of this, like I've been able to see my family I haven't I have not seen my kids. Previously, the way that I have been able to this year like it, we've been able to slow down. But man, I just recognize that there's just so many people out there that are that are scared, and they're hurting. And they're in a position that they've never had to be in before. I mean, I remember when I first got laid off in 2006, which really started my whole, like, it gave me a 90 degree turn on my journey. It was it was lonely. It was scary. I felt like a failure, why me? There's just a lot of emotions that go through it. And the interesting thing is now it's not like one person that's going through that it's not even one community. It's like the whole world is going through this industries have been devastated. And 10s of thousands of people in single industries have been put out of work. That has a huge impact on everybody else. Right. So that's been weird, and really weird.

Greg Marine  
Yeah, exactly. And speaking of the 2006, where you've been in this position before, 14 years ago, tell tell tell me about what that process was to get back on your feet.

Jason Alba  
Um, it was long and painful. I can imagine

Greg Marine  
so. So I

Jason Alba  
got I got let go from a company that you know, the industry was facility maintenance. They say you know, total facility services, but it really was was like a janitorial company that did some construction. And the reason why that's important is because you know, construction is like a 30 40% margin industry. janitorial is a 3%. Industry, right. And so when when when somebody gets laid off from a janitorial company, they're typically not getting out placement. Now placement back in the 80s. And 90s was, you know, it could be three 510 thousand dollar package. Now, it could go up for sure. Like, if you're hired for me, it wouldn't have been bigger than that. But, you know, when I got let go, it was the first time that I was in a job search that I didn't plan on, like I had changed jobs before. But it was always things that came to me and I would evaluate it and talk to my wife about it. And then we'd make a decision and move to another company. But this was the first time where it's like, you are going away. And good luck. You know, don't let the door hit you. And, and so I didn't know at all how to do a job search. I mean, this was 2006. I literally went and looked for newspapers to open the wanted ads. That's what I knew to do. And honestly, there's people I work with today and jibber jabber, you know, people in their 60s who get laid off after having worked at a company for 30 or 40 years, they've never even thought about looking for a job. And they go down and buy a newspaper to write, because that's how you did it back in the 1900s. And so I had no idea what I was doing. I did all the wrong things. I'm actually fairly introverted. I love people. I love talking with people. But I don't like going into big networking events where I don't know anybody. It's just uncomfortable for me. And so I thought, you know, I want to do this in the most efficient way possible. So I'm going to, I'm going to jump on job boards, like indeed, it will indeed wasn't really around back then it was really like monster, and careerbuilder and dice for the technology people, kind of how you segmented out which job boards you were going to spend time on. LinkedIn was around, but I remember going to a job club meeting one morning, and this guy was like, I landed a job Jason, you got to get on LinkedIn. It's so awesome. I'm like, what's that? Like, I really don't want to get on another thing where I have to have a login. That's such so obnoxious. So anyways, that's where I was at in 2006. And I started and I just banged my head against the wall, doing the most ineffective things you could do, which was looking for openings and applying to openings and hoping right? And then I remember there were times where I was out. And I was like, I can't wait to get back home and see if any new job postings have been posted in the last two hours. I mean, how stupid is that? And so anyways, that's really where I started out. And about six weeks in I wasn't making any progress like I was, I was. And I could talk for a long time about why that is that one of my friends, Nick corca, dillos runs asked the headhunter website and he there's a statistic that's been floating around for since I think the 60s that 14% of jobs are found through job boards, well wanted ads, I should say, like, posted jobs. And Nick came out a few years ago, and he said 2% of jobs are actually found through job boards.

Greg Marine  
Oh, that's incredible. To purple. Oh, yeah. 2%.

Jason Alba  
You know, I mean, 14% is already low. Right? But 2%. So anyway, that's what I did. I spent 10 hours a day, six days a week, I spent 60 hours a week on my job search, but it was very ineffective. Wow. And after a while, I was like, Okay, this isn't working. Let's stop, let's analyze what's going on, go read some articles from the experts and see what they say to do. And that's when I started to kind of realize, okay, I'm doing all these things wrong. I'm not doing any of these things, right. But as I'm understanding what the wrongs and rights are, I found this this. This constant bit of advice to everybody said, the experts said, you know, make sure you follow up, make sure you keep track of what you're doing. You don't want a recruiter to think that you're aloof or that you don't care just because you're disorganized. And so you don't record what you're doing, who you're talking to make sure you're doing all you know, the follow up is so important. And I kept reading that I thought, Man, you know, how do you do that? Have a spiral notebook. I've sticky notes. I can write stuff on my hand. Sure. But what if what if job seekers who were really treated like third class citizens and in the world? What if job seekers could have a tool that first class citizens had and that's the idea that's where the idea for jibber jabber the job search CRM came from. And and so I started this entrepreneurial journey and I decided to not look for a corporate job anymore, and I was gonna become super wealthy by Making a startup and then selling it like all the other super successful people have done?

Greg Marine  
Well, yeah, exactly. Sounds like quite the journey. And you'd mentioned some of the things that you were doing wrong. And I remember last month you wrote an article, basically don't give up. And so you kind of, there's things you don't give up on. But sounds like there are some things you should give up on.

Jason Alba  
Oh, absolutely. Seth Godin wrote a book about pivoting. It's called the dip. And he talks about culture sacks, where you go into, you go down a process, and like, you know, he, the whole analogy is like streets, right? You're going down this one road, and you realize it's a call to sack it's a dead end, essentially. And so you have to figure out when to stop and what to stop doing. So let me jump ahead of your question here. In my early job search, what I did was a lot of job boards, a lot of job board and, and that meant looking applying. And and you know, I told you the statistics on that they're just heartless, horrid, they're, they're discouraging. And it actually led me into a depression, right? And so and when you're depressed, you can't you don't think straight, right? You don't understand how to communicate your brand. Well, you don't network? Well, because you come across as kind of beyond sought and like, it's just not a good place. So anyways, let me fast forward a bit. I actually, you know, I started jibber jabber, I wrote a book, I became a professional speaker, which means people would pay me to come speak, which was really amazing. And I was in Austin, Texas, in a church basement, there's probably 40 5060 people in the room. And I had not thought of this line before. It just came to me in the moment. And I thought of it just really quickly as it came to me, and I thought, Man, Is this true? But but it was, and I said it. I said, If Jason Alba, we're starting a job search today. And I don't talk too much about myself in third person. So I probably switch back to First, I would spend 90 something percent of my time on informational interviews, okay. And so informational interviews are like a phenomenal, it's not a thing. It's actually a collection or a series of things. But if you take all the right things that you should be doing in a job search, it's an informational interviews. So I'll say, going on monster and a PA or LinkedIn now. And applying is easy. And you can feel productive. You can say I applied to four jobs today. Like how productive was that? Right? There's a metric, there's a statistic that you can track over time, informational interviews is like, I'm going to go have lunch with that person, or I'm going to go I'm going to have a phone call. It just didn't feel metrically successful. Right. Okay. But what I've realized over the years is that informational interviews, which is networking, and some of these other things, that is where it's at for job seekers. Okay.

Greg Marine  
And yeah, and I think one of the reasons that I reached out to you for this interview was because you're reaching out on Twitter, to get to, to basically give away your time, 30 minutes at a time, to job seekers, to kind of them and mentor them. But tell me a little bit about that.

Jason Alba  
Yeah. Ah, this is really a phenomenal. So there's some people that I've been following on Twitter for the last couple years that have been really inspirational. Christopher Johnson is one. And Chris says on on Fridays, I think it's on Fridays, says, What are you doing? On a note my calendar reached out to me are very giving person right and motivational and, and helpful. And I thought, I want to do that, like I want to, I want to give to people and help and inspire and give hope and ideas. And, you know, I wish somebody would have spent 30 minutes with me when I first started my job search and said, Jason, you're doing all the wrong things. Like what you really need to do is stop this and start this. And I know it's hard, but this is the right stuff. And so I'm actually in the process right now of redoing some around a dozen PluralSight courses, which is which is incredibly difficult. Like if I rushed through it could take a month to redo a course, right because I'm redoing the whole thing. And and I'm just really crunched for time. And I'm thinking I don't have any time. On the flip side, Fridays are like dead. Like, I don't get hardly any emails on Friday. I don't see much action on social on Friday. Like I could really sit around on Friday twiddling my thumb, just kind of waiting for something to react to. And I thought you know what, I'm going to open up my calendar. See how this goes. I mean, we're in mid November of 2020. And so I Thought, right? Let's schedule this out to the first part of, of 2021. So the first part of January, and see what happens, and I'll put it out there. I haven't put this up to my jibber jabber people yet I've just put it out to my Twitter, friends or audience or whatever. And so I've had people sign up. And it has been awesome. I've talked to brilliant people, people who are very, very high in their career, people who are just starting out in their career, I've talked to people across the world, I've learned about I go on the maps and, and I'm like, Oh, I thought that was part of India. And it's actually it's his own country by India, but it's not a part of India. I'm talking to people who are saying, I don't know what I'm doing right now. Or they'll come and say, here's a very specific issue that I have. So I talked to somebody who's looking for a promotion, a really, really awesome promotion within the same company. And I talked to somebody else who's like, I'm a problem with my LinkedIn profile, and other people who are like, I don't even know what I want to be when I grow up. I remember this one girl I talked to in I'm pretty sure it was you gone the. And she is very educated. She's getting a master's in machine learning. She has just really, really sharp lady, and she wants to help people. And I'm like, man, with your education and your experience with robotics and all that other stuff. You can write, you can write your own ticket, you can kind of go wherever you want, and do whatever you want. And she's like, I want to stay here in my country and help people and educate people on on technology and a man talking with people that are super ambitious, and people that have super big hearts. And it's been a lot of fun. It's been really cool.

Greg Marine  
Well, that is great to hear. And that's one of the encouraging things is that you're talking to people throughout the entire globe. And anywhere from people just starting out to those who want to do what you're doing being a mentor to. You had mentioned your PluralSight courses I saw you have 30 some, I think it was 36 total. Time and and so what what all do you teach? I mean, I saw what it was, but go ahead and describe to the listeners. What is it you teach through your courses on Pluralsight.

Jason Alba  
So when when Pluralsight first reached out to me back in, I think it was 2012. I had been on the road speaking about LinkedIn, mostly LinkedIn, did a lot of career management stuff. And I actually had nine courses on jibber jabber, I had a DVD on how to use LinkedIn. And so they said, we'd love for you to do, you know, back in 2012, they had a lot of programming courses. And, and, and they had a few soft skill courses. But they came and said, Hey, we would love for you to do a course on LinkedIn, we don't have anything on LinkedIn. And this is really, you know, obviously a growing thing. And everybody wants to learn more about LinkedIn. And so I did my LinkedIn course. And then a little bit later, I went back to my nine courses that I've done on jibber jabber, and I said, Well, let's do those on, on Pluralsight. And so I started doing those courses. And they were for job search, right? They were informational interviews and personal branding and career management and stuff like that. And so one day, though, I was talking with somebody, and I realized that there was an opportunity to start talking about soft skills, and then later where I would start to call professional development. And so I started doing courses on how to become a better listener, which is one of my more popular courses, probably, because managers of developers are saying, hey, before you go into a meeting with that customer listen to this course on listening, right. And so it's an easy way for managers, instead of them to coach and mentor, for a long time on how to become a better listener. It's like, go watch this course. And then let's talk about it in our next one on one. I have courses on working with one of my favorite course working with people who have personalities that are different than yours, right. So I remember an experience I had where I was working with somebody who had a very different personality than I did and what he was not warm at all is very business. He seems kind of cutthroat he. And and when I, when we interacted I was like, Man, this guy hates me. Turns out he didn't hate me at all. He liked me quite a bit. And he liked what I did. He just interacted different than I did. And and I thought, how many problems could be resolved if we recognize that at work? And of course, even in the job search, you're going to be communicating with people that communicate different than you do. If we recognize that just because somebody says something a certain way doesn't mean they hate us. They hate our work or anything. But that's just their personality, right. And so I really wanted to raise awareness on the differences and how we interact. So I, I have Team teamworking courses, I'll tell you one of my most favorite courses of all time, is on emotional intelligence. So I had the opportunity to start a course on emotional intelligence. And I was like, Alright, that sounds easy enough. Emotional intelligence to me seems kind of fluffy. Like, it's just one of those. I don't know, like, okay, whatever. Like, we can talk about this in a meeting and, and feel good about each other and say nice things. But then we all go back to work and like, I get paid to program or I get paid for my hard skills. Right? Right. So I had this lady come over to my house, and she teaches,

I don't know, health and awarenesses, and stuff like that at my kids High School. And she's a family friend. But But I learned that she'd been teaching about weekly on emotional intelligence to the kids. And I was like, Well, I don't know anybody else who knows more about this. So come over, and let's chat. We talked for probably two and a half hours, and I took tons of notes. And I was like, this is the most amazing topic out there. And after I was done going through the course, which is a learning process for me to figure out, you know, what I want to include and how communicate it and what I want to exclude and stuff like that, there was two things that really jumped out at me One was that if you have narcissistic or sociopathic tendencies, you could use the principles of emotional intelligence, to manipulate to the nth degree like this, this really could be dangerous, if you don't have good intentions. And so there's five pillars of emotional intelligence. And I added the sixth concept that you have to have good intentions in order to use those appropriately. Right. And so that was one thing that really stood out to me. But the other thing, and I tweeted this, you know, right after my course went live, I said, if you if, if the world increased our emotional intelligence, just a little bit, like if we became more aware of ourselves, and others, and empathetic and you know, the elements of those five principles, if we increased anywhere at any of those, how amazing would this world be where there was more tolerance, and more love and more acceptance and, and all that stuff. So that honestly, you know, they look at my catalogue of my 36 courses that I have right now. And hopefully, I'll be able to do more courses in the future. That's the one that I'm kind of hanging my hat on saying, this is how I'm going to touch the world. If I can help people increase their emotional intelligence, I can feel good about having created, you know, any content anywhere.

Greg Marine  
Oh, that is that is an excellent, not only story, but encouragement and inspiring chorus that you're referring to there. And you've mentioned a few times so far, jibber jabber, go ahead and tell me more about what you do with that. And I know you got it started because of your job search in 2006. But tell me a little bit more about what jibber jabber is, and how, what kind of a tool it can be for for other people.

Jason Alba  
Yeah, so I mean, jibber jabber is almost 15 years old, right? So what an app is out there, that's 15 years old, that looks good. It's kind of ugly, because it's like a 15 year olds going through, you know, hormonal changes as we're going through some changes, right. But the principle of jibber jabber is that I can organize and track what I'm doing, right. So one time I was in a, I was at a job club, and we would go in and have these weekly trainings and weekly accountability. And the people who were putting on this job club said, they found out that the spouses were saying, Well, why aren't you applying for jobs? You Why aren't you do it? Why don't I How come you're all you're doing is going out to lunch, right? And they thought, you know, we give these job seekers a lot of training on effective tactics. But we really need to help the spouses understand what was happening in the job search and why we are or aren't doing certain things. So we pulled together, they pulled together a dinner, invited all the spouses, so the spouses could have an exposure into what the systems and programs were. And this one guy was up talking about, you know, here's what we're doing and we're networking and following up and getting introductions and informational interviewing and all these things. And this one very sharp lady says she raised her hand and she said, this is so complicated, like complex as you meet one person and they introduce you to two people and then you talk to those two people and they introduce you to four people and and then you got to go back and circle up and follow up and all this stuff and and now you're interviewing with this company. Handle interview with four people and then, like, is so complex. She said, How do you keep track of it all and people in the room just started giggling because I had already launched jibber jabber by that point. And they're like, well, we got an app for that. Like, there's a tool for that. And that's really what jibber jabber is about, when we go back to the idea of informational interviews being very, very effective. You know, you really are going in and talking to somebody and saying, Hey, who should I talk to? Like, who can you introduce me to every informational interview can lead to one to 510 introductions, right? And, and so, you know, I can keep track of that, in my mind for a few minutes. I can keep track of it on Excel for a few weeks. But after about two or three weeks, if you're really networking, and you're really following up, and you're really being proactive about what you're doing, you're going to get turned upside down, and you're going to forget stuff. And that's exactly what happened to me out of spreadsheet. And I was looking at my to do column, I had all these names and companies and stuff. And I had this next next thing that I got to do. And and I remember Friday morning, I looked at it and I was like, Oh my gosh, yesterday, Thursday at 10 o'clock, I was supposed to have called this hiring manager. And it was like one of the only few calls that I ever that someone ever agreed to have with me during my job search, right? And I completely missed it. And I emailed the person I'm like, I'm so sorry, Mr. Call, can we reschedule and I never heard from him again. And I thought I need a tool that will flick me in the brain, you know, whether that's an email alert, or an SMS or whatever, but I need something that is not that's not going to fall apart. And so I thought I thought about, you know, the CRM that I had used previously, or seen my sales teams used previously. And I thought I need to make a CRM that dumb, like dumb down. And it's simple. And it's not pipeline, and it's not revenue. It is simply about networking and job search. And so that's, that's what jibber jabber has become a team that works on it full time, we still work on stuff. We're doing some really big stuff right now. And then we got to go back and work on little stuff. But I've always had developers on this since 2006.

Greg Marine  
Very cool. And speaking of job seekers, or what kind of job seekers, are they? Does that include like freelancers? Or are these just people trying to get jobs in the corporate corporate world?

Jason Alba  
Um, so my message is, you're not going to land a job and keep that until you retire. Right? Like, I want you to internalize career management and networking and branding, and taking care of your career because no one else is going to, I want you to internalize that. And even if you do land, your dream job, I want you to think, Okay, what am I doing now, to secure my finances in the future, whether that means I go to industry, networking events, and meet people from other companies, or stuff like that. So that's really what my message is on on Twitter. And I think LinkedIn, my, my background image is an image of a stream, because I'm a real big proponent of multiple streams of income. And as you digest more of my stuff, hopefully you start saying, Okay, what what can I do to have another income stream, right, other than a job, which can come and go for so many reasons. So that's really what i what i want to grow my audience and my users into thinking that I need to have gigs I need to have side hustles I need to have you know, rentals or saw whatever my other side, whatever my other multiple streams of revenue are. But having said all that, most people that initially come into jibber jabber, actually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna break this into a MB. Most people that came early in 2006 to 2015, were the corporate person, it was like one PR it was what person looking for their next job, I just got laid off, I need to organize my job search spreadsheet wasn't working. So I'm now here and I'm looking for my next job. That's what most of my users were somewhere. I don't know if it was 2015. But somewhere I started getting people who are like, I need something to help organize my stuff. And I am never going to be in this position. Again, like I will create another revenue stream, whether that's consulting, or I'm making a product that I want to sell. And if you're consulting, guess what you network, you need to follow up with the all the same stuff that the job seekers do is what a small business owner does, right. And so that that's one thing I love about these principles, and for me, it's under the Career Management umbrella. Whether you're a job search Your job seeker and your networking, or you are a consultant and Freelancer and you're networking, you're doing the same stuff, and you still need to follow up. And you still need to ask for introductions and all that stuff. And maybe you'll outgrow jibber jabber, maybe there'll come a time where you say I need to go pay, you know a lot more and get Salesforce or something like that. But I have people who have gone from job search to real estate agents. And they say on jibber jabber, because it's their tool where they have all of their contacts and their follow up and their conversation and stuff like that.

Greg Marine  
And you hit a few nails on the head here, you're talking about multiple revenue streams. Now, because you don't want to be in a position where you're, you're laid off, especially in a year, like this year 2020. But you need to have multiple revenue streams. And this is a tool that someone in any position could utilize, to be able to maintain the communications with all your contacts, even if it's not a necessarily a revenue stream, but it could potentially be one

Jason Alba  
absolute, I mean, I mean, people the job search experts to say network, whether you have a job or not like it networking is not just for job seekers. What so let me let me tell you this pathetic story about when I started my job search, I'd been a general manager of a software company. And then before I was General Manager, I was still at the executive level in the software company, trying to, to, to, to grow and become profitable, right, like, this was a bit of a mess of a company. And so anyways, I was heads down. I don't know, I would say, I was a workaholic, because I had a pretty good, you know, work life balance. But I worked a lot and I did a lot and I was focused on on fixing this problem of a company, right. And so it was good, right? It was good wall lasted, but then then it wasn't good. And I got laid off. And so I got laid off. And I knew nobody, I had just moved from a small town and moved another state away to a larger area, which is good, because you think there's more jobs, more opportunities and stuff like that. But I didn't know anybody in the town. Right? I had really no, no network. I had never gone to industry events or anything like that. I didn't volunteer for anything. Because I was busy doing my job. I was heads down. Hundred and 10% loyal at my job. Right? Exactly. Right. Then I get laid off. I didn't know Nobody. Nobody knew me. I didn't have no brand. I had no reputation, right. And so that's what I want to help people avoid. When when they come into jibber jabber, and they're like, I'm gonna get my job. And then I'm going to wash my hands of this job search thing, and I'm going to go just bury my head in the sand again. Well, I had this one person come to me and they said, Jason, thank you so much. jibber jabber was a great tool for my job search. And I just landed my dream job. Will you please delete all of my stuff? Oh, wow. And I was like, Yes, I will. Like you can do it. Just go into this place and click on delete my account, everything goes away. I said you can do it. I'll do it for you. I said, but there's no charge if you leave it sitting here. Because according to the federal government, we all know love and trust the federal government, right? So according to the federal government, every two to five years, we're in transition every two to five years. You're in transition. And early in my career, I thought cool. I'm getting promotions. But after 2006 I was like, wait a minute, transition. This is painful. I don't ever want to do this again. And if I do do it again, How awesome would it be if I had a network and the brand to be so different? Right? So this person's like, yeah, this is my dream drop dream company. Nothing's gonna happen. Two months later, they came back and they're like, hey, me again. Things didn't work out. You know, it turned out that there was some bait and switch the culture was completely different. Can I can I get my stuff back? And I'm like, I'm sorry. Like, I didn't want to, but you really wanted me to delete your stuff. And you're starting off. You're starting over from scratch. And so one of my big things is, you know, with job seekers and I when when you go in and you delete your account, say, hey, Atlanta, my job, please delete all my information, I say, Are you sure because it's free to keep it here. And you might be back in two to five years. And it's a lot more fun to come back into something that's already built than to have to start from scratch. Exactly.

Greg Marine  
Yeah, and I think one of the things you're encouraging people to do here is not even necessarily from two to five years from now, but to keep it up you get you land that dream job or that dream client, still use the tools you know, still do the networking, still communicate with with other people. And yeah, because you can't just rely on say Twitter or Facebook or anything like that. You've got to convince Newly build your brand?

Jason Alba  
Yeah, absolutely. And honestly, one of my favorite ways for you to transition into a new job is to, you know, you're not doing job search networking anymore. But I guess we can call it career networking now, like you have a new job, go meet people at your company, you know, go go sit down with them at lunch, or, or, or ask for 20 minutes on their calendar and get to know them. I actually took a job a couple years ago, because just because weird stuff was going on and, and I needed a change of scenery. And I was, I was ready to kind of, I don't know, I was feeling kind of stagnant, really. And so I went and took a job and, and I met people then back in 2018, that I'm still in touch with today, and not going to say that it's really been helpful for my for my career, or my company, or many of my revenue streams. But I know that if I were to go to any of them today and say, Hey, and a lot of them have moved on to other companies, go back to them and say, Hey, I'm actually looking for a role. I now have ends at probably a dozen companies, you know, that I didn't have before. Because I took time to get to know people. And like I said, I'm an introvert, right? So the way that I come to terms with that is because people are like, Oh, you're an introvert, you don't want to talk to people. It's like no, and you know, people say, well, it's how you recharge your batteries. The way that I really come to terms with me being an introvert and, and being around people is I love going deep with a person. Okay, you know, not not for like a deeper relationship necessarily, but I want to know about you. I want to understand who you are. And so so I get over any of my social anxiety or whatever, by just thinking, Hey, man, me and Greg, we're going to learn about each other like, right, and I'm going to figure out how I can help him and where he wants to go in life and all these other things. That for me is that next level of after you land your job, that's what you should be doing. Don't bury your head in the sand, and hide from career management. Keep doing that stuff.

Greg Marine  
Exactly. And like I said, you're an introvert, you don't have to be an extrovert to do any of this. And a lot of ways you just have to sit and listen to somebody lunch, sit and listen to their story. Because you're gonna learn from them. And then they might ask you questions. You don't even have to drive the conversation. So you can be an introvert and still do all of this.

Jason Alba  
Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. There's books on like, networking for introverts and stuff like that. And I think really where introverts really get hung up as they're like, Oh, my gosh, I have to go into that meeting or that room, you know, and it's like, no, you're just going to go talk and get to know somebody, you know, no obligations. But I don't know, for me, I love humans, I love I love this, the backstories and where you came from, and what you've overcome, and what your hopes and dreams are. And that's really where, you know, I don't look at this, like, we're gonna have a 20 minute meeting. And that's it, you know, and maybe I'll decide if I like you or not, it's like, I want to get to know you at a deeper level. And that's really where I start off my, where my mind is out on these types of relationships.

Greg Marine  
Now, are there any other tools that you would recommend with us? Do you still recommend LinkedIn and stuff like that for networking? Or is this just a face to face kind of networking that you're you're talking about?

Jason Alba  
I mean, I wrote a book on LinkedIn and actually wrote a book on Facebook didn't do very well. LinkedIn, the LinkedIn book did really well, I think it sold over, I don't know, 20,000 copies. So let me give you well, and then I'll say one more thing. I was on Twitter early on. I don't remember how early but I was early before the wave of like pop culture got on and kind of muddied it all up. And so I fell out of love with Twitter, walked away from Twitter for a while, and I got back a couple of years ago. And so I've been you know, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, the big three as they were. But really, the answer is go to where your audiences. Okay, so right now, I have tapped into this really cool group of techies on Twitter that I'm not seeing anywhere else. Like, I will go post stuff on Twitter. That's techie related that I can't post on Facebook, because most of my Facebook friends and family are not technical writers. They're not techie at that level. And on LinkedIn, I have a completely different group. Like those are more job seekers that are across the board of what they do and what level level they're at. So I go to where my audience is, and I think that's really the most important part. technologies are going to come and go right like MySpace went, you know, Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and been around for a long time. But LinkedIn has changed a lot, right? And so if you want to go on LinkedIn, there's good stuff there for sure. But the key is to find who your network and your audience, I actually talked about this in my courses, this idea of space. Yeah, I want to connect with a network of people who are in my space, and my space is my profession, my geography and my industry. That's ands, or ORS, right? So if you're in technology, I don't really care what industry you're in, and I don't care what your geography is, you're in technology, and Pluralsight would be relevant to you, my courses would be relevant to you. If I can find somebody that's in tech in my profession, and my industry and my geography, that's a really, really strong connection. Right? So what I'm saying is, let me let me narrow this down even a little more. Let's say you're like, well, I really want to go to LinkedIn, because that's what everybody is saying. Great. Go to LinkedIn. But the next level is to go into LinkedIn groups that are in your space. Yes. Right. So that's what that's what you really want to do is find out where people are hanging out in your space. And for some people, that's only face to face monthly meetings. And for other people. It's like right here in Twitter or right in this LinkedIn group.

Greg Marine  
Gotcha. Well, that's good advice. And I think for me, Twitter's been one of my things for this year. But I've also got LinkedIn, Facebook, but each one of those are a separate space there. They're definitely different audiences. So I speak differently. They're some of the stuff I cross post, like this podcast. I like the cross post, because it's a general podcast. But we'll talk about all kinds of technologies that affect everyone. In this case, the primary audience would probably be technical people, but some of your courses and some of your advice would definitely carry over to any industry. For sure, of course, this episode will then get published on all those platforms. Something I wanted to ask you about is one of the articles you wrote last, and I say article, but as a blog post last month, was on a bad reference. So I've had some experience as a CTO, where I had let somebody go, and they asked me for a reference, of course, in my mind, I was thinking that's, I may not necessarily be a good reference for you. So I'm not sure I could do that. But I nodded my head as they walked out the door. In the case of the article, you wrote about other types of bad references, what kind of advice do you have for people who may or may not have or may have a bad reference at one of their positions?

Jason Alba  
Um, well, and so when I when I come in here, I have advice number zero, like the basic bit of advice and advice number one, the think, I think the most important thing about a bad reference is, it might not matter. Right? I remember back in, hold on, let me think, probably 2004, like, this is a long time ago, this isn't something new, this is something that may be decades old. So back in 2004, ish, the HR manager sent out a memo to email to everybody saying, if somebody calls for a reference check, you can't say anything. Right? Send them over to payroll, and payroll can verify the dates they worked and their title or something like that. And that's it. Right? So, companies have been have become very sensitive to the idea of somebody saying something bad about a previous hire. Right, right. Um, it still happens. But I don't think you need to worry about it as much as you might have worried about it in the 70s and 80s, and maybe the 90s, right? So So what I'm saying is, if you have a bad reference, you know that you burned a bridge or somebody was a complete jerk or a turd, or they just didn't like you, it might not make that much of a difference. And so you might not have to worry about it. Right. The The other thing, though, is, is my advice number one on the blog post is just to address it head on. And what that means is, you have to figure out in an interview specifically, but maybe in a networking conversation, if somebody says, hey, why Why'd you leave that place? Or Hey, I heard some stuff about that other place, like what will happen to you? If you spout off, right? If you say, Oh, my gosh, my boss was such a jerk. And they actually got fired because of it, but I was part of the carnage before they got fired, right? You're not doing yourself a favor, you feel vindicated, right that you can save that your boss was a jerk and you weren't the bad person. But the problem is you come across as Having a grudge, not letting it go like all these things, right? And so what you want to do is have a line or a couple of lines. And so let's see. So I actually wrote this in the blog post, I said, Oh, this would be in an interview situation. Oh, you're referring to the separation of performance on my record, because this person that asked the question was from a city, right? And I said, Yeah, that was an interesting situation. Turns out my supervisor regular, regularly marked her team members with that, and abused it to the point where she, she got terminated for it. So there's not like, spite, like, My message is not I'm being factual, but I'm not like trying to dig into her right. And so what I found is too often, job seekers feel like they have to justify or validate why they lost their job. Right? And you don't you don't you don't exhaust A lot of times, it doesn't matter what you do, what you should do is come up with a really gentle, soft, like, yeah, it was it wasn't really that big of a deal. Here's kind of what happens. Yep. Let's move on to the next topic.

Greg Marine  
Exactly. Yeah, that's some that's some gold advice. So I'll call it gold advice. Because that applies to everybody. Everybody, especially especially in the first world, any corporate environment, that is golden advice,

Jason Alba  
you know, you know, my wife had some inspiration years and years ago, she was talking about somebody a lot. And she heard her inspiration was stop talking bad about this person, because it doesn't matter. And what she found was that when she held on to it, and she talked about it, she internalized it and and harbored bad feelings. And it impacted her quite a bit. And people around her were like, Oh, there she goes again. Right. And so that became part of her brand, right. And so I see this with job seekers and and like I said, you feel like you need to be validated or vindicated. And you really don't people don't care. But what happens is you you harbor that badness inside of you, and you just don't let go of it. Number one, number two people around you see you as toxic really, there's not a there's not a other word that I can choose right now. They look at you and they're like, Okay, I got to watch out for that person, because they really hang on to things, you know, so you just got to let it go. I know it's hard. I'm still upset about what happened to me back in 2006. And I harbor bad feelings. I actually saw the guy at a restaurant a year or so ago. And I had a little bit of an anxiety attack like it attack it was. I was like, I don't want him to see me. I don't want to see him or I'm going to eat, keep my head down and sneak out the door. You know, and this was over a decade later. I mean, I understand those feelings. But the more you communicate those, the you're just kind of digging a hole for yourself. No, exactly.

Greg Marine  
We're Well said. The last question that I wanted to talk to you about is actually one of your latest blog posts, if not the lightest, is do the thing. Now, in my case, I'm glad you wrote about that, because something you had said months ago, and a few other folks on tech Twitter said, you know, get out of your comfort zone, do the thing. You know, worst case scenario is it won't work out this blog post or this I'm sorry, this podcast is one of those things for me.

Jason Alba  
Good for you.

Greg Marine  
This is the seventh interview. This is the seventh episode of a blog, Pat, of sorry, podcast. I can't say that correctly. A podcast that I'd never even dreamed of before this year. Oh, I thought what's one of my core competencies that is talking to people getting some information out of them, sharing that information with other people? What better way to do that than a podcast? So here I am doing the thing. Tell me what? What other encouragement do you have for people with that in mind? The do the thing?

Jason Alba  
Yeah. So my The thing was my Friday, you know, 30 minute career consultations, I actually I've been thinking about it for years, and Christopher inspired me. And every the sun, moon and stars came together. But really, it was like, I just need to push the button and do it. Right. So. So let me let me marry two ideas. So early on in the job search. I was with a guy who was also in this job search and he got up and he started talking about the chicken list. And I was like, what's the chicken list? I don't have a list of chickens. And he said, No, no, the chicken list is a list of things that you're afraid to do. You're at Chicken, you're afraid to make this call to this person, because for some reason they intimidate you, or you're embarrassed to make that call, you're afraid to email that person, right. And so what his message was, was, look, you got 20 people, you need to reach out to three of them on your chicken list, do the chicken list First, get that out of the way, it's the hardest thing mentally get it out of the way, right, and then everything else is just going to be easy. And your day is gonna fall into place. And so I've really carried that idea for a long time. Actually, I want to marry three things. So then, so that's thing, one chicken. Last thing, too, is understanding what your priorities are. And so I have this program called the job search program, which is based around informational interviews. And it's a phenomenal program. And I borrowed with permission ideas from a brilliant business coach named Mark LeBlanc, who's in the Minneapolis area. And Mark LeBlanc talks about he talks about so many cool things, one of the things he says is you need to choose three high value activities to do every day. And if they might take five minutes each, it doesn't matter how long they take. But if they're the highest value activities that you could do that day, I don't care what you do the rest of the day, you will have had a successful day. But get those three things done. Right. And, and so there's a there's a concept from him, where I thought, Oh my gosh, we need to really figure out prioritizing, because a lot of times we'll go and start our day with 20 things on our list, and work our way down our list alphabetically or some, you know, however, they came to us, and we're not getting the most important thing done. Right. Okay. So let me let me take another idea that I got from Mark LeBlanc, because he talks to a lot of small business owners, and he says, talks about the idea of identifying your niche, right. And and, and so for me, I love multiple streams of income, I have multiple streams of income, but and so when he was talking about the niche, I was like, that's cool. I got my niche here, and my niche chair, my niche, my niche here, I'm gonna work on all my niches. And he's like, no, pick one, focus on your niche. And he says, I don't know how it works. But all of the others grow when you focus on the one and you have success in the one the others grow. And I'll tell you right now, Greg, I don't know how it works. Either. The math doesn't work. For me. It's fuzzy logic. But it works. Like when I focus on one or the other things do grow, as opposed to giving a little bit to each of them. And none of them grow. Right. And so, okay, so marry those three concepts with the last airbender cartoon with aim, not the one with Korra. But one thing, which is a brilliant series, watch it with my 11 year old, fell in love with the show. And, and and do the thing. There's a character who says that who has an assistant, he says, Julie, do the thing. And he never tells her what the thing is, she always does it the right thing. We never tells her what it is. But she does a thing. And that had this in my mind, like do the thing, do the thing, do the thing. And I married those three ideas together. And it's like, you know what, we need to make sure that we get over our fear. That's the chicken list thing. We identify where we really need to be, which is the niche thing. And we do the thing to help us accomplish that. And that's the that's the prioritizing the high value activity thing. And so if you do the thing, now know what your thing is, like for you, it's the podcast and probably breaking through that mental barrier of starting your podcast has just kind of freed your mind a little bit and then allowed you to be like, I can do stuff I can. So I don't know doing the thing is so powerful. So that's where that blog post came from.

Greg Marine  
Very Excellent. Well, Jason, thank you so much for being on talking tech today. And, and good luck with all your all your endeavors, the PluralSight courses, jibber jabber, and everything else that you're doing. Thank you so much for giving back to the community, especially this new venture that you're doing every Friday, mentoring individuals on their job search.

Jason Alba  
Yeah, my pleasure. Greg, thank you been a pleasure.

Greg Marine  
Thank you for listening. This has been talking to