In this episode of the “Get Hired” podcast, Nicky Bulmer and Misty Combs interview Corey Maass, a WordPress developer, discuss the hiring process for WordPress developers. Corey shares his extensive experience in WordPress development, emphasizing the importance of community, communication, and continuous improvement. The conversation covers optimizing WordPress sites, handling client feedback, and the significance of authenticity in interviews. Nicky and Misty provide feedback on Corey’s resume and portfolio, highlighting the need for clarity and measurable achievements. The episode offers valuable insights into job seeking, negotiation, and presenting oneself effectively in the tech industry.
Top Takeaways:
- The Importance of Staying True to Yourself in Job Searches: The panel emphasizes that not every job or company is a good fit for everyone. It’s more important to be authentic and align with roles that reflect your values and personality rather than trying to conform to something you’re not. However, desperation during challenging times can complicate this, making it harder to prioritize alignment over necessity.
- Every Job is a Learning Experience: Even if you accept a role that isn’t ideal, you can use it as a stepping stone. Challenging or mismatched experiences still offer valuable lessons about what to look for (or avoid) in the future, help grow your skillset, and shape your career trajectory.
- Shifting Hiring Trends and Perceptions: The job market’s expectations are constantly changing. For example, job-hopping is more accepted in tech compared to other industries, and long tenures at one company are sometimes viewed as stagnation. Different generations and industries value different qualities, making it crucial to stay adaptable and aware of trends in your field.
Mentioned In The Show:
🙏 Sponsor: Qmnisend
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🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:
- Nicky Bulmer (Technical Hiring Coordinator, Liquid Web)
- Misty Combs (Human Resource Director, Liquid Web)
- Corey Maass (Founder, OMGIMG)
- Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)
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Transcript
Michelle Frechette 00:00:04 Welcome to the Get Hired podcast with Nicky Bulmer and Misty Combs. Every episode is an opportunity to learn better resume and interviewing skills with these HR experts as they review the resume of a job searcher and conduct a practice interview with them. They give real feedback that everyone can learn from. This is a Post Status Production in partnership with Liquid Web sponsored by Omnisend.
Nicky Bulmer 00:00:36 All right. So we are recording. We are doing our first Get Hired podcast. So thank you for Corey Maass for being with us today. I appreciate you, being our, our guinea pig, so to speak.
Corey Maass: Happy to do it.
Nicky Bulmer: Awesome. Thank you. Your career path from what you submitted to us, is a WordPress developer. So, we put together some interview questions that we might ask if I were interviewing one of our WordPress developers. Is there anything else that you want us to know before we go ahead and just dive right into everything? Do you want to talk about, you know, anything else besides WordPress development that you’d like us to touch on or.
Corey Maass 00:01:21 No, I think it’s fine. I mean, given treating all of this as a as an example, I think that’s fine, right? It would come down to if if you were because I’ve, I’ve been a CTO, I’m also, an amateur bartender. And so it would just come down to, you know, what position you are actually hiring for. So I think if we treat this as an example of hiring query as a WordPress developer, which is the most likely scenario for me, then, you know, that’s that’s a great place to start.
Nicky Bulmer 00:01:54 Awesome. so I’m Nicky, I’m the hiring coordinator at Liquid Web. I do all the actual hiring, and Misty’s my boss, so she doesn’t do any of the hiring, but she yells at me when I mess it up.
Misty Combs 00:02:07 Which, which could be partially true, but, I’m Misty Combs the director of HR for Liquid Web, and in my career, probably the first 20 years, I did a lot of recruiting. But I’m thankful to have Nicky handle that now.
Corey Maass 00:02:24 That’s awesome.
Nicky Bulmer 00:02:27 So I’ll just go ahead and dive right in. We’ll do the interview first, and then I’ll go and give you some resume feedback, and portfolio feedback, just at a real high level at the end. So tell us about you. Tell us about your experience and, and why you think you’d be a great WordPress developer?
Corey Maass 00:02:47 Sure. I started building for the web back in the 90s. I don’t like to count those years so much, but I think there’s just about three decades there of experience now. And, started, like most web developers, cutting up designs in Photoshop and then taught myself, JavaScript and then back in the day, ASP Classic, just as it was going out of fashion and then eventually jumped on the the PHP train because that seemed to be picking up steam and obviously very glad I did. And then around 2010, 2011 started getting hired for WordPress development because it started to become one of the more popular frameworks for front end development or not front end of front end facing websites.
Corey Maass 00:03:46 And in the early 2000, I also caught the web app, SaaS so-called bug and started my own entrepreneurial entrepreneurial journey there. And yeah, so had was building SaaS apps for many years and then and from about 2010 on, almost all of my day job experience was WordPress, just because, again, it became more and more popular. And then, somewhere in the middle there, I switched from building apps outside of WordPress to building SaaS apps using WordPress, and then also building plugins inside WordPress. So yeah, WordPress for the last five, ten years has has really been most of most of my universe experience. Like, I’m both, involved with the community and, selling products inside the WordPress world. And then also, I still have ongoing clients where I maintain pretty large WordPress websites and both front end and back end. So lots and lots of WordPress focused experience. And me being me, I tend to go deep on things. And so, WordPress has become a point of passion and focus where I’ve again been very involved in the community and tried to help out with running events and, and stuff like that.
Corey Maass 00:05:19 So I’ve also got access to a pretty good network. So when there’s occasionally something I can’t figure out, I’ve got a, an extensive network of people that I can reach out to to get help.
Nicky Bulmer 00:05:31 Yeah. The WordPress community is one of the the biggest and deepest communities that I’ve seen since I started working in tech. Like, it’s a it’s definitely a I would say that it’s probably at least as good as the Linux community, because you can dive in to a forum or on Reddit or whatever and get help and almost instantly for anything that you need. I always joke with people that if you want the right answer, post the wrong answer and somebody will correct you.
Corey Maass 00:06:01 Oh, 100%, 100%. But it’s friendly. Like there’s I, I find I previously having been involved with other communities music related and then tech related. One of the big differences that I, I think that drew me to WordPress is that people you don’t get nearly as much of the, know it all, the condescending so-called neck beard, kind of behavior. And, and it’s a very welcoming community, which I, which I, I value immensely.
Nicky Bulmer 00:06:34 Yeah. I always joke as, as a Linux nerd that I’m the basement dwelling neck beard, and I’m actually in my basement. So it works. Took care of the beard today, though. So how do you handle like feedback and revisions that you receive from non-technical people that you’re working with or collaborating with non-technical team members?
Corey Maass 00:06:59 Yeah, that took, that took a lot of practice. Starting as a, a deep nerd in my 20s, I definitely went through the ‘know it all’ phase. The ‘you’re not technical so you don’t know as much as I do’ phase and whatnot. And then one of my early successes, a loaded word. But one of my more successful web apps that I built, around 2010, was a little app called The Birdie, and it would email you every day and say, what did you buy? And you would reply to the email with what you bought that day, and then it would track your expenses.
Corey Maass 00:07:44 Very, analog obviously isn’t accurate, but a very simplistic approach to a difficult problem. In the age of Mint and, and other apps that were coming up at the time. But it, it resonated with a lot of people. It especially resonated with people in countries that did not have access to bank accounts and things like that. So in some ways, it was the Mint.com for, you know, people in Bangladesh and, and, and stuff like that. And then it also resonated a lot with, in particular, there was a grandmother who, I wound up communicating with a lot because she’s like I, yes I, you know, she has a bank account and stuff like that. But, you know, she liked the simplicity of it. The the email came to her. She would reply to the email. It felt more conversational and it felt more friendly. And I worked really hard with the branding. I had actually bought the domain, the birdie.com, because I was going to build a Twitter client, which the universe just did not need another freaking Twitter client.
Corey Maass 00:08:54 And so I owned the domain, and I just started building this little app using the domain I already had. Anyway, but I ran with the name, and people liked the name because it was very friendly and it kind of took the fear out of finances and stuff like that. All that to say, it was a heck of a learning experience for me because I built a simple product. The whole point was for it to be simple and friendly. and then I found myself because I was the sole everything for that project. I wound up having conversations with a lot, a lot of very non-technical people. And because it was my project, you know, I didn’t there was it wasn’t an option to be rude. It wasn’t an option to be condescending. And it helped me really build this, empathy muscle that I still work hard to maintain. And so, after 15 years of practice now, I like to think that that muscle is pretty strong. But for most of the projects that I do, there’s almost always that element of working with people who are non-technical.
Corey Maass 00:10:06 Like one of my, my main clients right now is an online magazine. So I’m dealing with a lot of writers who some of them, they had never even seen WordPress before. I basically forced them onto the platform. sSo having good conversations, easy conversations, gentle conversations about tech, and then, I use a plugin for that project. In particular, I use a plugin that takes over the WordPress dashboard and creates a knowledge base. And so I do a lot of documentation and a lot of video walkthroughs and stuff like that. And then there was one other example. But anyway, so that’s kind of how I handle it. I end up dealing with a lot of folks who, who aren’t technical. Oh, and, and I also customize, the projects that I build. So, like when they sign into WordPress, they see about four things in the admin menu. Whereas I of course see 40. So, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of different ways to approach that. But, you know, mostly coming from a perspective of, there’s nothing wrong with this person not knowing the tech. How can I, you know, guide them forward, essentially.
Nicky Bulmer 00:11:22 So you mentioned, you know, plugins and and building plugins for WordPress. Walk me through your process when you’re creating a plugin. How do you start? How do you get to the end?
Corey Maass 00:11:37 I am very much an MVP kind of developer. Minimum viable product. That doesn’t work for everybody. And so if I were to come work for you. That would play a big part in you knowing about how I work. I am coming from my, again, my background being, when startups kind of became a buzzword when building SaaS apps kind of had gained their first popularity in the early 2000. A lot of the thinking was around building something simple, getting it out there, trying to get your first customers, or at least your first users, to start using it to give you feedback. That’s very much how I work. So a lot of my when I submit work, it is not perfect. It’s not meant to be perfect.
Corey Maass 00:12:30 To me, it’s an iterative process. And so talking about building a plugin, Starting with the idea, you know what’s the least amount of code and the fewest screens that I can produce and what what not often unstyled or whatever. You know, essentially to prove the use case, and then and then keep iterating on it. So looking for a lot of feedback, a lot of early on, iterating towards the end. Now, does any software project ever actually end? That’s a good question. But at least getting to a point where it’s, you know, publicly releasable, looks good enough. Functions well enough, is well tested, that kind of thing.
Nicky Bulmer 00:13:14 Yeah, I think I don’t think they even end when they technically die, because there’s always that one person out there that’s like, I just really like this version. What is it about WordPress in general that has been most exciting to you? Like, what do you love about WordPress?
Corey Maass 00:13:35 A lot of it, honestly, is that community that we talked about earlier on. Excuse me. But I’ve also found that it’s it’s it’s grown well. I am not a fan of the block editor. I, I use I know.
Nicky Bulmer: Those are danger words.
Corey Maass: I know and I’m and I’m being diplomatic here. But the the rest of WordPress, I think, is a phenomenal platform. I have, in working on it for 15 years. I’m sure there have been scenarios where there’s things that I couldn’t code around, but I struggle to to think of them. It’s just set up in a great way that you can almost always code around things that are built in, or obviously integrate with things that are built in to accomplish whatever you want. So, I’m a big proponent of using it for just about everything, at least that humans are going to interact with. So I really like it. I’m. I’m. Yes. The code could be cleaner, and we don’t need widgets anymore, but, you know, there’s other than that, there’s, you know, it’s just a great platform that I’ve found that I can, What? I bend to my will.
Nicky Bulmer 00:15:02 RIght. My big eekk moment with WordPress is, you know, back in, like, 2012-ish and the very early days of it, you know, people would install and it wouldn’t load or there’d be permission issues and they’d be like, oh, just put it on seven, seven, seven and we’ll go. And I’m like, can we not? Though there’s got to be better ways. So, I’m, you know, I haven’t been on the, the back end of it in a long time, but hopefully that’s not such a common occurrence anymore.
Corey Maass 00:15:30 Yeah about around then 20 2013 or so. I tried to help a buddy of mine was the the web guy for a church and for a pretty big church in Nashville. So a big church in, in the scheme of big churches. And he said, oh, well, you, you know, WordPress, can you help me out? And he was a, I want to say C plus plus or something Java developer.
Corey Maass 00:16:05 Right. Like PHP is for children kind of developer. So he had added about, I don’t know, 5000, 10,000 lines. Not even to functions like not even to the theme file, but to the index. Like he basically did all custom code. Right in the index. And so I, I, I said, sorry, I can’t help you. At least not for free. But, yeah, I, I, I’ve actually come to like, I like that there is a WordPress-y way to do things. and I’ve, I’ve gained a lot of experience from, in particular working with. I worked at Ally, the big agency, for a while, and then after that worked at, often OptinMonster. And working with these big teams was wonderfully eye opening. Like, I learned a lot and learned a lot of the, like, WordPress-y way to develop things which, PHP purists complain about. And I and I understand where they’re coming from, but it actually has taught me that, like there is a Laravel way to do things.vSo there is a WordPress way to do things. There is a dot, dot dot way of way to do things. And yeah, I’ve, I’ve just gained a lot from that, that kind of experience.
Nicky Bulmer 00:17:29 Do you have any tools or processes that you really enjoy going to, when you’re working with the distributed team? Everybody’s remote now, so everybody has their favorite collaboration tools and project management tools. What do you love using?
Corey Maass 00:17:47 Like most developers. I’ve never found a project management tool that I like. And I don’t think I’ve ever been foolish enough to build. No, that’s not true. I actually technically built one, but it it wasn’t really meant to be used for project management. One of my first big WordPress commercial WordPress plugins was a Kanban board. And so the some project, a lot of project management happened, but that wasn’t why I built it. But, Slack. I basically live in Slack, all day, every day. For with a with a number of different in a number of different contexts, but that’s my my favorite way of communicating.
Corey Maass 00:18:29 I find it asynchronous enough. And then, what I, what I think I like well, for me, I, I tend to over, over communicate. I’m the kind of I’m, I’m the opposite of the stereotypic type of developer who, like, disappears into their basement. No offense.
Nicky Bulmer: None taken.
Corey Maass: And, you know, and then and then a week later, comes back. Like I said, I learned early to be very iterative. And so for me, it’s it’s a little bit of work and a lot of communication and then a little bit of work and then a lot of communication. And those, those are the teams that I tend to work best with. And so then the then the tools just kind of get out of the, get out of the way like Slack is great. You’re chatting all day, every day. I think it lends itself to easy and often communication. And then, you know, tickets live where they live Jira or Monday or or pick one. You know they all especially the these days they all kind of do the same thing and they they all have now added all of the same features. So they all kind of do the same thing. So it’s it’s just a matter of figuring out which, which one this team works with. And, and then coming up with the workflows that work for me.
Nicky Bulmer 00:19:43 What about like version control tools?
Corey Maass 00:19:48 Version control meaning like Git?
Nicky Bulmer: Yeah.
Corey Maass: So I mean, Ally taught me about doing really strict, code reviews and stuff like that, which is great. For better or worse, a lot of the projects that I work on tend to be on the smaller side. So I use Git for absolutely everything, mostly to protect myself from myself, or to protect whatever team I’m on from me. And as they will do for, they will protect me from them and them for me. I’m getting circular here. But yeah, I, at least for me, like, you know, just strong muscles and Git. It’s it’s an absolute necessity usually used for deployment. in addition to code review and and basically keeping code clean and tidy and then, being able to walk things back when you need to. But, but I don’t I, I personally don’t have a strict I’ve worked within strict Git flows not Git flow but get various flows within Git. again it just kind of depends on on what the team’s already got going.
Nicky Bulmer 00:21:03 What are some of the steps that you would go through to optimize a WordPress site?
Corey Maass 00:21:12 Starts with testing, wrapping my head around what’s what’s currently being used. And then obviously you can’t fix a problem if you don’t know what that problem is. So whether it’s speed or a lot of what I’ve run into is pretty terrible, terrible themes. A lot of people reach for that $20 theme off of wherever, and then, and then they want things customized. So then everything starts to break. And so that kind of optimization is tough. Usually there’s, I do an analysis of what plugins are installed, why they’re installed. And is there any way of like, how many, how many can we combine or replace or remove often. Nobody needs a WordPress site with three different form plugins.
Corey Maass 00:22:07 And the number of times I’ve seen a WordPress site with three different form plugins is a little shocking. And then because of, at least in the last, the the last few sites that I’ve dealt with tend to tended to be larger. A lot of the optimization actually needs to happen on the server side, which is usually figuring either talking to whoever is in charge of hosting, or working with somebody to optimize the server and, and the hosting side of things. Because WordPress I mean, it, it, it can be very heavy. So I there’s also all that, that other stuff of like deferring lazy loading images and deferring scripts and blah, blah, blah. But, I think you asked where you’d start. So, so yeah, I tend to, I tend to look at what’s closer to the metal to begin with.
Nicky Bulmer 00:23:04 What are the most amount of plugins that you’ve ever seen on a site?
Corey Maass 00:23:09 Somewhere in the 70s, I think, and it’s like, there’s not like that’s a what do they call it, a superlative.
Corey Maass 00:23:18 Like usually you don’t need 70. But like and I and I, you know, I, I check myself like right now again, I run a large magazine site. It gets a lot of traffic. It’s got somewhere in the 30s, I think, like active plug-ins, which should upset me. But, you know, when I review them all and like, I trust the code that’s behind them because you could have a thousand plug-ins that all run one line of code. And, and these days, you know, PHP Aidt and a good, a good host company and good caching. Like it’s not it’s not going to actually add a lot. So it really just depends on what functionality and whatnot. But yeah, usually usually if there’s if there’s 70 plugins you can usually find redundancy. Or at least you can disable the snow effect, when it’s not Christmas time. You know those kinds of things, right?
Nicky Bulmer 00:24:15 Yeah. I, I had 107 one in.
Corey Maass: Wow month.
Nicky Bulmer 00:24:21 Yep, yep. And it was exactly what you said, like three fourm plug-ins and, you know, six caching plug-ins that all conflicted with each other. Like, why is my page not loading? Because it’s at war.
Corey Maass 00:24:34 Well, yeah, a lot of like, I, I ran into this early, early on. I had it actually was one of the many things that that drew me to starting to build WordPress plug-ins and then WordPress plugin to try to sell WordPress plug ins was I had one client in particular who in I built him this nice WordPress site. It was basically meant to be like a Yelp style. He like he he did restaurant reviews and he had other people writing restaurant reviews. And instead of, you know the and the value right was the the reviews of restaurants and the content. This is why people would go to the website. But instead of working on more restaurant reviews or taking out ads or like actually optimizing the value of the site, I kept finding that he had gone into the plugin repo and just like, installed this plugin or that plugin because they’re all free.
Corey Maass 00:25:36 And the analogy I always draw on is I’m like, you’re you’re standing in the line at the bank, and so you and you’re bored. And so you get on your phone and you’re like, let me go to the App Store and let me download. Whatever, download whatever free apps, and just play with them. Right. And, and with the phone generally you don’t have to uninstall them. There’s no harm in leaving them there. And so I’ve run into that scenario a lot, where people often instead of it feels like productive procrastination. But it’s just procrastination. Like people should be working on the content or adding, you know, if it’s a WooCommerce site, they should be adding products or they should be, you know, writing more blog posts, or they should be like actually working on the business. But it’s more fun to, like, go find the next cool plugin. That is because it’s all in the plugin directory. At least it’s all free, right? So, yeah, it’s it’s an easy trap to fall in. And, I’ve had to have that stern conversation with, with at least a few people of it’s your site. If you want to try to break it, go for it, but at least uninstall the stuff after you’ve tried it, you know?
Nicky Bulmer 00:26:45 Yeah, yeah. What about like, let’s say you make an amazing app or plugin and you’re so happy with it, and then you give it to the client and the client’s like, no, I hate this. This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. How do you work with them? Where do you go from there?
Corey Maass 00:27:04 Like I say, I hopefully, hopefully we didn’t get there in the first place and that’s why. Another reason why I tend to work very iteratively. Lots of conversations, whatever work we can do up front. I also again, coming from the early SaaS days, there’s a lot of conversation around. Excuse me. Customer interviews. You know, quantifying, qualifying? Quantifying, the end user, you know, before you build the thing. And so it applies to client situations or employee situations as well, where it’s the like, are you sure you want this? Do you know you need this? That kind of thing. And so I, I don’t I can’t think of a scenario in many, many years where we got to the point where I was handing something over and they went, oh, I hate this because they had way, plenty of opportunities to figure out that they had hated it long before then.
Nicky Bulmer 00:28:03 Do you want to ask any questions, Misty? Or just quiet?
Misty Combs 00:28:09 Sorry. My dogs keep barking and that’s why I’m staying on mute. But, I’m good at this point. Sorry.
Corey Maass 00:28:15 I’m glad you can’t hear the, the snoring. I can’t even see him. He’s hidden over. I want to one of three. The the cute little one follows me around, and so he sleeps on the guest bed that’s next to me. But for for being this.
Corey Maass 00:28:30 Snores like a dog this big.
Misty Combs 00:28:32 Mine are 100lbs, and they’re usually super snoring, so I locked them out so they would be quieter. Now they’re just obnoxious outside the door
Corey Maass: 100%.
Nicky Bulmer 00:28:42 You can count dogs upstairs. So he’s usually pretty quiet. But if he’ll hear, if he hears me down here, he’ll get really sad and start doing the. Oh, mom, where are you? Have you ever done, like, pair programming? Do you like working with the team, or do you prefer to focus on working by yourself?
Corey Maass 00:29:07 That’s a good question. I, I really like working with other people. I am also a little atypical developer. I’m an extrovert, and happier working with other people. Again, the conversation to me is more fun. Collaboration is more fun. So, from that perspective, yeah, I’m actually happier, which is, I mean, outside the context of, of this interview. Like, I am, for the most part, a solo freelancer. And so it’s it actually gets not difficult. But, sometimes I’m, I, I have a nice. The good part is I have a nice network of colleagues, and so I tend to be chatting with them throughout the day anyway. So it kind of emulates that experience. But. Yeah. Working. Working together on something I find more, more generally more fun.
Nicky Bulmer 00:30:07 Have you ever done pair programming before?
Corey Maass 00:30:10 Technically, yes, but in like, 20, 2008 or something. So nothing. Nothing quite so structured.
Nicky Bulmer 00:30:23 That’s something that you think you would enjoy trying again or.
Corey Maass 00:30:28 Sure. I haven’t I haven’t heard about it in a really long time. just doesn’t generally come up in my kind of world. I tend to be, you know, even the big companies, technically, big companies that I worked at are small companies, and tend to be a bit more independence. Not the right word, but not corporate. And so for me, the like I have, I have a cousin who’s a Silicon Valley programmer you know, lives in San Francisco, works for big, big like real, actual big companies. And so runs into that kind of thing a lot more. I honestly haven’t heard that phrase in, in my ecosystem or my, my world in a, in a very long time.
Nicky Bulmer 00:31:17 I think, I think one of our Stellar brands is trying to bring it back.
Corey Maass 00:31:22 I mean, I don’t dismiss any of it like, I’m, I’m I might have a good or bad experience, but, you know, all these things exist for a reason that it if it was a good idea and it caught on, somebody must have. It must have worked for somebody at some point. You know, I mean, I was I was around in the first wave of Agile when it was, you know, capital A agile there, there. And, and that was its actual loan process. And, worked with big, big teams implementing some of the first, waves of agile processes of, you know, daily stand ups. When we all went into an actual office and actually stood up and, you know, and all that kind of stuff and, and it’s, it’s interesting to see how a lot of those things they work or they don’t for different companies. I’ve been in a, in many, many companies that have implemented a bunch of these different things, elements.
Corey Maass 00:32:19 And then, you know, some of it sticks around and works, and some companies have still have the daily stand up. But no, none of the other processes. you know, a lot of, a lot of the companies and teams that I’ve worked with end up picking and choosing which I think is the right approach. Right? It’s sort of lowercase a agile now, which can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. People, so pure programming, why not? The only the only real experience I had was, two very giggly developers were working together in a very open room. And this was before noise canceling headphones really caught on. So, externally, my experience wasn’t awesome because mostly it was the two of them sitting there giggling and not getting a lot done. But again, I, I hold that against them. Not the process.
Nicky Bulmer00:33:18 That’s fair. That’s fair. yeah. This is the last question that I have prepared here. I think. I don’t want to just fill the whole time with questions and, do you do you feel you got a good practice here? Do you want me to add a couple more?
Corey Maass 00:33:37 No, this is great.
Nicky Bulmer 00:33:38 Okay.
Corey Maass 00:33:39 Certainly sufficient because I, I think it’s I’m honestly more, more interested in talking about the hiring stuff than, you know, doing the doing the actual interview, but. Yeah, it’s all fun.
Nicky Bulmer 00:33:53 I think that the interview was really strong, and I’m actually really glad that we did the interview before the resume feedback.
Corey Maass 00:34:02 Take that Misty
Nicky Bulmer 00:34:03 Boom. In your face. I think that your resume doesn’t necessarily give a good picture of the volume of experience and, you know, lived experience that you’ve had. And while it does reflect a bunch of projects, let me go ahead and do you. Are you okay with me? Let me see if your address, your numbers on it.
Corey Maass 00:34:29 No, there’s phone numbers on there.
Nicky Bulmer 00:34:30 Yeah. So I won’t share it. We’ll blur that out and maybe add it and editing later so that we don’t share your personal information here.
Corey Maass 00:34:37 We’ll fix it in. Post, as they say.
Nicky Bulmer 00:34:39 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We’ll fix it in post. But, your your resume. We don’t have to do one page resumes anymore. You can you can do to. I wouldn’t do more than like 2 or 3 pages, but, really, you want something that’s easily glanceable, easily like something that, you know, if it gets ran through AI it doesn’t choke on any kind of formatting or anything. The strengths that I have listed out here, you know, it definitely demonstrates the diverse amount of experience that you have and the vast amount of experience that you have. You know, you have a very comprehensive list of skills. You have a great variety of experience. So I really appreciated about it. Do you want to add anything Misty?
Misty Combs 00:35:29 I know it’s a little odd because you’re not actually interviewing for a specific company. So when you have a chance to, you know, you’re going to be asked, you know, do you have questions for us or what do you want to know about the company? And it’s kind of a hard set up since we’re not even pretending to be a specific company.
Misty Combs 00:35:45 But I definitely would be prepared for whatever reviews apps that you want or websites you want to use to dig in a little bit. But if you don’t really have anything because like, you seem to work a lot with the people we work a lot with. So if you really were interviewing at Stellar, you probably know a fair amount. So if you really don’t have company questions, you might ask things about the process. What is the process look like? What’s the next steps? Who am I likely to speak to next? And that gives you a chance to dig into their LinkedIn and find out something about them. So you go in more comfortable and more prepared. And then we didn’t ask them. But there’s still lots of companies that ask you for your strengths and weaknesses. And, my favorite thing about talking to you today is you’re very much focused on a user experience and communication and planning. And sadly, we see lots of developers that aren’t. So if if I was elevator pitching your experience. It would be that strength that makes you stand out.
Corey Maass 00:36:52 Thank you. Yeah. The, I thankfully it’s it’s, So I’ve, I’ve also done hiring in the past and learned a lot from that experience. As well the as the, the questions. So one of the biggest things that I, I had to focus on, I’ve always been a very confident person. but it’s also easy in an interviewing process to be very demure, you know, or you’re, you’re there to just kind of say yes or to to paint a picture for yourself. It took a long time for me to learn that, again, it’s a confidence thing. And it’s also like, you have to not desperately need the job, to be able to feel comfortable to be in the position of your also interviewing them. And so, you know, any time that I’m looking to work with a new company, or even pick up a new client because, again, I’m primarily freelance these days. I’m often interviewing them and think of it that way.
Corey Maass 00:38:00 Like, this is a conversation we are deciding if we are working together. But it took me a long, long time to get there. Right? Like, it’s very easy to you. Don’t you don’t want to ask any questions. Unless you’ve Googled them on on LinkedIn and are just trying to flatter them because, you know, like when I was in my 20s and early 30s, it was all about like, well, let me make sure I get the job. And I’d even been in interviews, where I hadn’t where I was like very early on, I was like, I do not want this job. And then I would still sit there and, like, work really hard at flattering them and not have any questions. So it took it took me hiring other people to be like, oh, they’re asking me really good questions. This is a good conversation. And then also going on a couple of horrendous. Oh, okay. You you need to also do a spin off podcast of like tell your Worst story because.
Nicky Bulmer 00:38:58 That’s in the works. Don’t worry. I’ve already said that because because we’ve got we have a lot.
Corey Maass 00:39:02 I’ve got some doozies. I’m happy to. Happy to be on the first, first guest on that one too, because I’ve got some good ones. But yeah, all of that to say, like, I, I think there’s, I for me, it was a process to learn this, but like approaching it as a like we are interviewing, we are sincerely interviewing each other and and that has to be okay. I’ve also been in front of people interviewing who were appalled that I was putting hard questions to them.
Nicky Culmer: No I love that.
Corey Maass: And so but again, that that kind of told me everything I needed to know of like, oh, so you’re very corporate. You’ve gone through, you know, just enough, you know, training to interview people, but you expect it to go a certain way. This is not a good fit for me. And also being able to say in the middle of an interview like, yeah, sorry, I let me just let’s just stop, you know, and and again, that’s that should be okay. But it’s not normalized.
Nicky Bulmer 00:39:57 I when I speak to students, I speak a lot to a lot of colleges and a lot of high school kids. And I always emphasize that to them too. So that’s why I was really excited when you said that. Like, you’re interviewing them as much as they’re interviewing you, if they’re asking you illegal questions or they’re making you uncomfortable. In a personal level, like if it’s a, if it’s a discomfort about your experience or something that’s normal in an interview. But if you’re uncomfortable because they asked you about something they shouldn’t be asking you about, like, you know, your your family, your personal life, things that you don’t have to share, then you excuse yourself. You don’t want that job, you know? So it’s it’s okay to walk away and save yourself some time and heartbreak of, you know, dealing with an unhappy work situation.
Misty Combs 00:40:44 I also think it’s important.
Corey Maass 00:40:46 I’m sorry.
Misty Combs 00:40:47 I’m sorry. I also think it’s important as a candidate to ask, why is this job open? Is it that we’re growing and bringing in new people? Is it because it’s a horrible place to work? Nobody will stay and everybody’s running away? Or what does the career path look like once my foot would be in the door? What does success look like in three, six months? 12 months? What’s my career path? What’s the typical progression of the career?
Corey Maass 00:41:11 What’s the typicalWorkday?
Misty Combs 00:41:12 Yeah. How flexible are you and what is your culture and what’s important to you and what’s your communication style? Because I worked for Satan’s sister once. I don’t ever want to work for a company like that again. And just like you said, I had terrible vibes going in. I sucked it up and did it anyway and stuck it out for a year. And I have lots of good stories about how not to run a business and treat people from it, but I really wish I hadn’t went through it.
Corey Maass 00:41:41 Oh I bet. I’ve even worked for. There was a company I worked for a few years ago that had the self-awareness. They, we we had a we had an interview. I could smell the desperation, which was fine. Because they offered me, like twice the money, which of course is also a red flag. But I was like, I will hear them out. And and then they kept insisting that I speak to one of their senior developers. And I was like, okay, fine. And, and so I met with, with him and, and he was like, you know, it’s a shit show. And that’s why we’re going to offer you twice as much money. And, you know, but if if you know that going in, you know, and, and he said, and we’re trying to make it better. And so we want to hire people like you. Nice little bit of flattery. You know, but we’re going to make it worth your time and effort. And I was like, okay.
Corey Maass 00:42:36 Like, thank you for being very honest. And so when I walked in and the squirrels were eating the insulation, I was like, okay, this is this is fine. Like we’re working towards something. And then when it wasn’t any better, I don’t remember how long I was there. A year and a half or something. I said, okay, that’s enough. And and left and took the money and ran. But, you know, it’s it’s it was it was a nice bit of fun. It was a shocking a bit of self-awareness. I have to be impressed.
Nicky Bulmer 00:43:08 There’s something to be said for honesty on both sides. Like, I don’t care if you don’t know the answer to every single thing that I ask you. But if you lie to me or try to cover it up with, like, high level buzzwords and, you know, repeating the same thing I just said back to me and saying my name a bunch of times, like pass.
Misty Combs 00:43:31 That’s my favorite Nicky story is how often she interviews typically salespeople who every 14 seconds say her name. She loves that.
Nicky Bulmer 00:43:40 Yeah. Yeah. It gets old.
Corey Maass 00:43:41 So Misty when I hear you saying Misty is Nickyi’s favorite thing is.
Misty Combs 00:43:47 Yes. Nicky favorite thing is hearing the word Nicky..
Nicky Bulmer 00:43:51 Yeah.
Corey Maass 00:43:52 Yeah, I’ve. I’ve encountered those humans, but I, I can’t. You want them to not be real? I’m sad to hear they are still real.
Nicky Bulmer 00:44:00 My my favorite, not favorite was one that kept getting my name wrong. They called me Nick over and over and over again, and I’m like, I don’t go by Nick. You gotta stop. And they’re like, oh, I’m really sorry about that, Nick.
Corey Maass 00:44:15 Hear me hear the words I’m saying.
Nicky Bulmer 00:44:18 Yep. So to turn it back around and go back to the resume review.
Corey Maass 00:44:25 oh sure.
Nicky Bulmer 00:44:26 Yeah. Some of the the improvements I mentioned the layouts a little bit muddy. I would clean up your work history and projects a little bit so that it flows better when you read it, because right now it’s kind of like you have your education and skills kind of in there. And then there’s projects here and work history here, and it just flows a little bit weird. So I would look at that.
Corey Maass 00:44:48 How so how? Okay. So for, for, since we’re not showing anybody what I’ve got is like it had always been even even recently, it was reiterated to me that it should be one page and skimable.
Nicky Bulmer 00:45:03 Skimable yes..
Corey Maass 00:45:04 And so, you know, but how do you. So I’ve, I’ve got a resume with two columns. One is selected work history because I couldn’t begin to fit every company. And frankly, I don’t want to admit half the companies that I work for. And then and then, but most of my job history is, is projects. Either my own products or me freelancing. And so I’ve got on the, on the so my left hand column are like real jobs that I’ve held. Right. And then on the right are projects, products, things, other things that I’ve done. So I hear you, it doesn’t all. So I could probably put more on the page, but under each one is a bullet list that just tries to highlight, you know, what I got out of it or why? Why that job made me makes me remarkable. What what would make that more skimable? Like keywords up front or.
Nicky Bulmer00:46:05 Yeah, I would put the skills first.
Corey Maass 00:46:08 Okay.
Nicky Bulmer 00:46:08 Yeah, I would put those first. And then your employment history will flow right into your, your projects. So. Yeah.
Corey Maass 00:46:18 Because it’s I mean, and I guess it’s the interspersedness of, like, I’ve had jobs and projects and then jobs and then projects, and so, I struggle to highlight all of that in a in a one timeline kind of way.
Nicky Bulmer 00:46:34 And you can read that in there. It’s a little muddled to be some of your bullet points. Talk about, you know, the technology that you use, some talk about successes that you’ve had, some talk about the duties that you had. So I would just align that a little bit more. So they all read kind of the same.
Corey Maass 00:46:51 Okay.
Nicky Bulmer 00:46:52 Yeah. And then, the other thing that was a little bit strange was, your, some of them have your title as a bullet point, and that just reads a little bit.
Corey Maass: Oh yeah? That is weird.
Nicky Bulmer 00:47:05 Yeah. So, like under dart, you have CTO lead developer and project manager as a bullet point. It just it just reads a little weird. It kind of. The flow’s a little bit strange there. But, I mean, and as you said, it really showcases that you just have a massive amount of experience, and trying to fit it into one page is just not pressetable.
Cory Maass 00:47:23 And that’s the struggle.
Nicky Bulmer 00:47:25 Yeah.
Nicky Bulmer 00:47:28 The other one that I have here is, instead of telling us the company your project is, put that title there, and then talk about the the achievements and stuff. And then the language that you use should be more instead of generic phrases like maintained, you know, put some active language in there, things that are measurable successes, like I increased the page load speed by 10% or, you know, after I redid their page, their conversion rate went up by, you know, whatever percent or, you know, measurable things that you can put in there that will catch people’s eyes.
Nicky Bulmer 00:48:04 A lot of people have AI reading things now too, so, they’re looking for those specific little words or skills or.
Corey Maass 00:48:13 So what I’ll say is, if anybody listening to this and hoping to learn something is walk away with that stuff, because a 30 year career I couldn’t tell you any of that information, right? Because I don’t. I mean, I worked there even even if it was only five years ago, like most developers don’t have access to those kind of analytics on even at a professional level like you could you could brag or make them up or, I don’t really mean it like that. You could infer them. But so that’s that’s actually an interesting point is, like anybody who’s just starting out or still early on, like try to walk away from a job with, with, you know, if that’s important, then, then try to walk away with that, those actual data points rather than, you know, what I did, which was like, I sat at a desk every day and got the job done, but I couldn’t tell you, you know, how many millions I made them or whatever.
Misty Combs 00:49:15 And thats very fair and I think very common. And so what you might do is try not to cover 30 years. So in your skills area, you’re putting the things that that you know really well, the things that aren’t of interest in where you’re trying to take your career, you might let drop off. So you probably don’t need to go quite as far back in in your employment history. That’ll free up some space. And then the things that you are really proud of or exceptionally skilled in go at the top of your of your skills section so that they really stand out as the thing that makes you different from the crowd. I’ll give you an example. We posted an ad and because it’s one click easy apply through so many websites. It is not unusual to have 7 or 800 in a day.
Corey Maass 00:50:03 Right.
Misty Combs 00:50:04 And and that is why AI is screening so many of them and, and it’s difficult and and that is why to help you stand out from the crowd, to be able to say I had this measurable improvement might make you stand out, but it’s a fair statement that we we don’t always know what that measurement is.
Corey Maass 00:50:25 Yeah. The the resume to me, like I’m I’ve always been a good interview. I, I was chatting with a buddy this morning and, and he’s like, you know, I get it. Like you, you never you were never not qualified. And I was like, no, I was often not qualified, but I never I never wasn’t going to get the job from, from the sake of, for the sake of a conversation. Unless like once in a while, I had a pretty terrible interviewers, you know, but I’m I’m a good conversationalist. Generally, I can figure out how to relate to people, all that kind of stuff. The hard part that I’ve never been able to figure like. And also the Joker in me, like I want my resume to be like one big, like, just interview me and you’ll, you’ll and you’ll find out how awesome I am kind of thing because yeah, the, the the resume part never felt any sort of representational. And like you said, like there’s.
Corey Maass 00:51:21 How do you convey a broad, broad depth or a broad, broad depth? you know, a broad history, a deep depth. A lot. I have a ton of experience. I can figure out the day to day stuff like it’s it’s incidental, you know? But the working with people, working well with people, higher and lower. More experience. Less experience how that how you convey that. How you convey a sense of humor. At one point, I did have a resume that was, like, not jokey, but it was, like, inappropriately creative. but I almost think that that helped me because at least I stood out. Now, I think that would actually be maybe trickier. Like, you’d have to be careful with words because AI is not going to interpret a design. Well. So anyway, it’s, you know, maybe the the landscape is changing.
Nicky Bulmer 00:52:18 Throws me to some feedback on the portfolio side of things. So I also did click through your portfolio.
Corey Maass: Yeah.
Nicky Bulmer 00:52:26 And you could do some of it on your resume, which is the summary paragraph at the top, and talk. You know, I have 30 years of experience. Obviously, I couldn’t fit it all in here. I put some highlights and talk about some, you know, throwing some keywords there for the the AI to pick up. That will still give us a look at your personality.
Corey Maass 00:52:47 Do you think now at least the way you guys are processing resumes. Should that be on the resume? Because usually for me that was always either in a, a, a needless cover letter, but I often necessary or just the email I’m emailing somebody saying, hey, I’m applying for this job here. You know, in my 30 years, blah blah, blah. Resume attached.
Nicky Bulmer 00:53:08 We don’t require cover letters for most of our jobs unless it’s actually like a writing or like a lot of marketing. We ask for them, but people hate cover letters now, and honestly, most of them don’t get read. You know, if I look at a resume and there’s something that I have questions about, like a gap or, you know, a change in career or something, then I might go, oh, I wish I could like take a look at a cover letter. But for the most part, I, I don’t read them until last, you know.
Corey Maass 00:53:38 And I guess that’s why I’m asking. It’s like could or should that information because again, there was for me the I mean I because I have always found it. An annoying exercise. My cover letters tended to be very short, but I also have the benefit of being a developer, often working for small teams. I’m not in corporate America with. So I need a, a four paragraph cover letter intro or whatever. But anyway, my point is, is that I would use that other that it was an opportunity for me to write more language, right? And write paragraphs, sentences and paragraphs. And so there I could often convey, again, humanity, experience, humor. And so I’m wondering if that isn’t now like should if if my resume is going to be thrown in a pile of 800 and processed by AI in order for it without maybe without a human looking at it initially is there a benefit to me putting those kinds of sentences at the top of a resume?
Nicky Bulmer 00:54:46 Yes. Still. Yeah, yeah. I don’t use AI to look. I read every resume that comes across my desk because I don’t want to miss those nuances.
Corey Maass: I”m so sorry.
Nicky Bulmer: Yeah, I know, I’m, I’m I’m getting to a point where I can’t really do that anymore. but the, the point that I was going to make there is that even if I did use AI to screen over it first, then I’m going to read through all the resumes that have the skills highlighted that I’m looking for. Then I’m going to read through everything as a person. And I still get to see that personality. The thing that you have to be careful about is, you know, you have the benefit of being well known in the community. So a lot of people know your personality and would read that and, you know, go. But as you know, a lot of HR professionals aren’t in the WordPress community. They’re not in the tech world or whatever. So they don’t know who you are or what your personality is like.
Nicky Bulmer 00:55:35 And a lot of times, humor, creativity can come across as, you know, unprofessional or condescending or, you know, there’s a word that I’m looking for, and I can’t think of it now. Of course. But, you know, basically, you don’t want to come across as, you know, this guy thinks he’s better than everybody else, you know? And, you know, after having had a conversation with you, I can absolutely see the personality in it. But initially reading through your portfolio. You have that Yorkshire tea comment on there. And I was like, oh, is this guy a little extra, you know, is he going to be a little bit, you know, drama to manage like so you just you have to know that while putting your personality in there can backfire too.
Corey Maass 00:56:23 And and honestly, at this point, at this point in my career, it’s on purpose. If if you don’t if you’re not gonna like my dad jokes, we can’t work together.
Nicky Bulmer 00:56:33 And so that was a plus for me but.
Corey Maass 00:56:35 So, you know, there’s, it was also a lesson learned from, like, again, start up, landing pages, marketing pages. Right. Is you want to both qualify or qualify and then also disqualify. And so for me, again, it’s a desperate attempt to put any sort of personality. But also, you know, because I’ve like I’ve worked with or I’ve been interviewed by or, you know, met with potential clients where I’m like, they’re humorless. They just want me to grind. 16 hours a day. They, you know, like. And I have to work. I have to want to work with you, too. You know, that’s a big part of that interviewing back kind of process. And obviously, an interviewer isn’t always necessary, isn’t always indicative of the team or the people you’re going to work with. But you’ve got you take the cues where you can get them.
Nicky Bulmer 00:57:34 Yeah, for sure, for sure. And you, you have the luxury of having that, the ability to be picky in that way. But I did want to mention it for folks that are watching that might not be in a place in their career where they can they can have that freedom and.
Speaker 5 00:57:48 Choosing to mess around..
Nicky Bulmer 00:57:49 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Misty Combs 00:57:54 But I, I agree that it’s a great idea to have a professional summary at the top for the the person reading it after AI screens it for your skills list and it it is an opportunity to if you know what company you’re applying to. So you kind of have an opportunity in your research to kind of see where they are as an organization. Are they very. Do they seem to be very corporate and and stuffy? And you might take an opportunity to scale that message to who you know is going is most likely to read it. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying, you know, as a professional with decades of experience, I have yet to find the challenge that I wasn’t willing or able to step up to.
Corey Maass 00:58:43 There’s one of the things that, like, I’ve, I struggled with a lot, I’ve alluded to here and then have passed along like I’ll also talking to students, new people in the industry and whatnot. Is desperation is a hard thing early on and and fear in general. Right? Like, not always having the privilege of not needing a job. And and how much that can play into this whole process. Right. Like how you convey yourself. You’re sitting there going, like, I went early on in my career, I lived in New York City. Very expensive place. Wanting to have a life and go out and whatnot. Just leaving the apartment cost money and then, you know, needing back, especially back then needing, needing tech, needing a computer, needing a phone, needing all these things. Played a big part in how I conveyed myself, really represented myself, both in what I was writing my resume, cover letters, whatnot, trying to be very formal and whatnot.And then, and then in interviews and stuff like that, too. Right. Like having. Being afraid. Like I’m still not a good negotiator. Like that still scares me. Just. I’ve never had good practice.
Corey Maass 01:00:07 And then talking about money. And and so I can kind of muddle through it now, but like that, that stuff is hard, you know, and, and and and so important in this process. And a lot of us get no training and for and and depending on your trajectory, you’re, you’re only doing it every couple of years maybe. So it’s it’s tough.
Misty Combs 01:00:32 That that brings up good points too. So if you’ve had a had killer rounds of interviews and you get that, job offer, it’s okay to ask whoever extends that job offer to you. Is this negotiable at all? I’ll take a look at it, and I will get back to you with the response. And you can ask them, you know, what is the turnaround that you expect from me for response? Because a lot of times if you’re interviewing one place, you’re interviewing several places you might have be expecting more than one, offer. And you might hope for some days that you can wait for those to come in to compare.
Misty Combs 01:01:10 And keeping in mind sometimes that where you’re negotiating isn’t always your base pay. It might be a sign on bonus, it might be more vacation time. People sometimes try to negotiate things you can’t negotiate like, oh, I’m going to need a different, well, title, but a different health plan. I can’t give you a different health plan. We only offer one. It’s audited under 5500. I can’t make it an exception for you, so I can’t negotiate. And they don’t understand that. Or I want, something different in a 401K. The IRS controls that. My plan document is in. I can’t give you anything different with that. So, I don’t know how people necessarily know what can and cannot be negotiated, but usually dollars, PTO time. Yes. Benefits package not usually, particularly with a larger company, but, I it’s a struggle. It’s a struggle, particularly because in tech we work with people that might struggle with communication in general. We’re not always really comfortable in our emotional intelligence.
Misty Combs 01:02:13 We don’t always pick up on communication cues. So having the being prepared to say is, is this offer negotiable? How much time do I have to consider it? Let’s you step back, let the anxiety go down, take a hard look at it, compare your options, and then get back to them when you’re a little more comfortable. And it’s a struggle.
Corey Maass 01:02:35 Yeah. It’s scary.
Nicky Bulmer 01:02:37 It is. Real quick, the other feedback that I had here on your portfolio is some of your links don’t take you to the relevant part of the page. You just click it and it reloads the page. So if I’m looking at somebody who’s developing WordPress pages. I want that link to take me to where I’m looking at.
Corey Maass 01:02:58 To be fair, or just for the context of the portfolio site. Got built in about 45 minutes. So that’s another good bit of feedback, not only to me what you just said, obviously, but to anybody listening is, Yes. Bang, bang this stuff out because you have a phone call in an hour, and so you’ve got to have something to show. But then go revisit it and have your friends and colleagues go click on everything. So they’ll let you know when something doesn’t load correctly.
Nicky Bulmer 01:03:32 I’m also okay if you just provide me with a couple links to things that you’ve worked on and say, I’m putting my I’m revamping my portfolio site and I’ll get you a link by X date or whatever as well. So, knowing that you. I put it up pretty quickly. I’ll just I’ll just go real quick through. the, a couple other.
Corey Maass 01:03:51 And I’m not making excuses. It’s more the like. This is it. This happens. You know what I mean? Like I. My sight for years has been because I don’t I don’t ever get work through my website and had not until again just a couple of months ago, had not ever thought of it as a portfolio because work comes to me through either me applying and then a conversation, or usually word of mouth or what have you. So, it was like, oh, I and so my website was always like it was creative.
Corey Maass 01:04:26 It was interesting. It was meant to be a little like experimental because that’s my background. And then it was like, oh, no, this needs to be bland and straightforward and have a big picture of me smiling at the top, like, what am I doing?
Nicky Bulmer 01:04:39 No, don’t put that on there. We don’t want your pictures. I mean, it’s on everybody’s resumes and stuff now, but I don’t want to see a picture of what you look like because that’s going to give us the that’s going to put us in that place of unconscious bias land where, you know, you can look at somebody and infer things about them just based off of their appearance or in.
Corey Maass 01:05:01 Well, that works in my favor, right? Like me smiling and looking charming, you know, endears me to you.
Misty Combs 01:05:08 But I’m sure.
Nicky Bulmer 01:05:09 That’s going to tell us things that we can’t judge you on, like race or potentially religion or. Yeah. Sorry, Misty.
Misty Combs 01:05:18 I was just going to say probably as a freelancer looking for jobs in the in the community, you’re right. Looking friendly and engaging and and happy probably gets you more clients. reaching out to you. It’s a little trickier in a job interview.
Corey Maass 01:05:35 100%. Yeah, I get that.
Nicky Bulmer 01:05:38 Yeah. For those that might stumble across your portfolio, and then click through it, the other things that I have here are, you know, some of them are just a an icon of the places that you work that take you to their web page, but it doesn’t. I mean, I don’t know if you worked on their web page, just a landing page, the page as a whole. So just a little.
Corey Maass 01:06:00 That’s on purpose
Nicky Bulmer 01:06:01 Doing a portfolio for a company, though. Put a little info about that. And then, for the apps and games and plugins that you’ve built section, no hiring manager is going to go try to find it, download it and look at your code or whatever. So just put a little, you know, idea about what you did and what you used to make it or whatever. For, for people that are making traditional portfolios that might be yours. Those are the things that I would suggest.
Corey Maass 01:06:25 No, absolutely. You’re absolutely right. Yeah. And it’s I mean, and what. Yeah. What I’m taking taking away from this. Like, I’m not trying to argue with you. The, the yeah. The difference is intent. And I think that that definitely people should have more of exactly what you’re describing.
Misty Combs 01:06:43 And you should argue with us. And at the end of the day, it should be the perfect reflection of you. And if if we’re sticking the muds and we don’t appreciate it, you don’t want us anyway.
Corey Maass 01:06:53 Well, and that’s why, like, this is, it’s this is a fun conversation, right? Because it’s all experiential. I mean, my my experience is one are now dated. So, I mean, my stories are going to amuse and delight or probably more likely amuse and horrify anybody listening. But I also am hoping that most of the practices or things that that made them good stories 20 years ago, are outdated and or aren’t.
Corey Maass 01:07:26 You’re you’re less likely to see them now. I hope you know what I mean. But it’s but that’s it’s this is what’s tough with with exactly the this this whole topic is, you know, different, different career paths, different trajectories, different experiences. They’re going to color your overall, you know, where you end up.
Nicky Bulmer 01:07:49 And not every differences to every generation has different focuses, different experiences and different lived experiences.
Misty Combs 01:07:56 And as we’ve talked to before, not everybody’s a good fit for every company. And it’s way more important to be true to yourself.
Corey Maass 01:08:07 And unless you desperately need the job and that’s and that’s where it gets tricky and scary. And because I’ve, I’ve worked for places, where I never should have said yes in the first place, but I, I needed the, I needed the job, you know, and so then, then what do you do a whole different whole different.
Nicky Bulmer 01:08:25 Briefly.
Misty Combs 01:08:25 We’ve briefly talked about sorry.
Misty Combs 01:08:29 We’ve briefly talked about AI. And it is kind of scary in tech right now between definitely your product doesn’t end up being as good if you’re an organization using AI to write your marketing, or it’s never as good as a person yet.
Misty Combs 01:08:44 But how many companies are there? Nothing beats quality like a low price right now. And the job market is kind of scary right now, so. Absolutely. Your comments and observations about being desperate. Definitely change things right now.
Corey Maass 01:08:58 Yeah.
Nicky Bulmer 01:08:59 But every desperate position that you wind up taking is also more experienced to take you to the next one. So if you do find yourself in a job where you’re miserable and you don’t like the leadership or you don’t like the work environment, then you take that experience and you learn you know what to look for in the next job. You take that experience and grow your portfolio and, you know, just look at it as a learning opportunity and a stepping stone to get you through to the next thing. Just because you accepted a job, you don’t have to stop looking for your next one.
Corey Maass 01:09:29 Right. That’s what not to do. The, I was also lucky where I for a long time I was in tech where tech was booming and it’s in tech. Maybe this has changed, but again, for much of my career it has not ever.
Corey Maass 01:09:46 It was never a detriment to jump jobs every six months. Right. Versus like I’ve, I’ve known plenty of people in education or whatnot where like, it’s a huge red flag if you don’t stick something out for two years. And so that’s I think I can’t I can’t fathom that. But that’s the way I’m wired. Like, I have definitely taken jobs and not and never stopped looking. I’ve, I, I think the shortest I was ever in was, was three months. But I’ve known people who have, you know, will will stick with a job for a week or two and then peace out to something else because they just needed a one paycheck to get through to the next, the next job, you know, which is I.
Nicky Bulmer 01:10:27 Don’t put them on your resume.
Corey Maass 01:10:29 Well, that’s it, that’s it. Right. And and you do have to be a little you have to be careful about reputation. Right. Like, if you’re depending on what what circle you’re in or what ecosystem you’re in or what have you. But, small town, you know, that kind of thing. You’ve got to be a little careful. But.
Nicky Bulmer 01:10:48 Some people are also red flagging now, people who have been in a company for a very long time because of stagnation and, you know, not learning new processes. A lot of times when people stay in a role, they’re not growing and learning. So that’s that’s now another scary thing that you’ve stayed too long. So and it changes every day. It changes what people are looking for and what they want based off of current trends. But also, you know, what Misty is looking for is not going to be the same as what I’m looking for, because she’s kind of like a really old generation X mindset. And while I am an X’re also.
Corey Maass 01:11:22 Your not allowed to say that anymore.
Nicky Bulmer 01:11:23 I’m more of a millennial mindset. You know, I we’re not allowed to say old?
Misty Combs 01:11:29 Well, not if not if we were interviewing, but truth is truth.
Nicky Bulmer 01:11:33 Well, I can. Tell you how old I am as an interviewer. Yeah. Just don’t tell me how old you are.
Misty Combs 01:11:44 Oh, I’m telling you, lady.
Nicky Bulmer 01:11:48 Do you have any questions for us or anything before we wrap up?
Corey Maass 01:11:52 No, but I, I just a comment that I think this is great. Like, there there needs to be there is always needed to be more transparency around hiring, all the kind of stuff that that we’ve touched on and, and a thousand other things. But, because it is a scary process, an intimidating process, a process that does not have a lot of transparency. There’s there are resources out there for, for getting help, you know, but but it’s they’re not always known to us. Like, I again, I had breakfast this morning with a buddy of mine, and and he’s got one child in college and one child about to graduate high school. And so we’re talking about them going out into the workforce or or, you know, interviewing for opportunities that aren’t necessarily jobs and whatnot. And, and how much how do you get more experience and how do you think on your feet, and how do you handle these various situations that come up? And, I there’s thankfully there’s so much more knowledge and information and insight and, and talking and thinking about like appropriateness and like you brought up, you know, rules and regulations and stuff like that.
Corey Maass 01:13:10 But I would also say, like, there’s a lot of the times it’s, it’s what I’ve struggled with is it’s, it’s not, it’s not nearly so nefarious or, black and white or even a legal sort of thing, but just these little subtleties of, a human talking to a human and trying to figure out how to negotiate a situation of just again, like, if I’m sitting here nervous because I need the job. you know, that’s going to affect my behavior and how I represent myself in a conversation, right? And so the more experience we can have, the more contact we can have with other people in that kind of context or hear from experiences. All, all of it, all of it relevant, some of it entertaining. But, you know, I just I love that. I love that you’re approaching this topic.
Misty Combs 01:14:02 I appreciate your, your observation about experience, too, even in the examples that we gave where maybe the interview is not going well, it’s not a place you, you know, you don’t want to be. If you suffer through it, chances are you will still take away some tools. Some the questions that they answer that maybe you want to look up later. There’s lots of good, content. Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming because there’s so much. But if I’m asked this type of a question in an interview. What is it that they’re looking for? What does this this question mean? And if you’re gathering that information, it just makes you better and stronger for your next interview. And then you won’t be as nervous because you’ll be better prepared or you. You know, you came through the meat grinder and you survived and and you lived the next day and you didn’t just stroke out because, you know, somebody was abrupt and rude or asking illegal questions or, or whatever the situation is. So experience does make us better.
Corey Maass 01:15:01 And 20 years later, you know what to do and not to do when you’re the one hiring, which was beneficial for me.
Misty Combs 01:15:08 That’s true.
Nicky Bulmer 01:15:11 Well, I appreciate very much your, you know, working through our first episode with us and and being willing to put yourself out there to, you know, help other people too, thank you so much. It’s been it’s been a lot.
Corey Maass: My pleasure.
Nicky Bulmer: Of fun talking to you. I appreciate it.
Misty Combs 01:15:26 Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much for being our first we greatly appreciate it.
Nicky Bulmer 01:15:32 And then, I don’t know, we maybe we can add a link in post or whatever, but if anybody is watching this and wants to participate, please go to the Post Status page, and find the the Get Hired link and sign up because we would love to talk to anybody who’s looking for job. It doesn’t have to be a WordPress job. It can be anything inside or outside of tech. Just we’d really like to, to help people get on their feet and get out there. So, please don’t be scared to apply.
Misty Combs 01:16:05 Thank you.
Michelle Frechette 01:16:14 The Get Hired podcast is a Post Status production in partnership with Liquid Web, sponsored by Omnisend.
