Video Transcription:

We are going to be talking about the future of the career services industry. And we've been talking about this a lot. We just had our career jam tech jam. We just had our tech jam a few days ago, a few weeks ago, and we talked a lot about technology in our practice, but we also talked about technology and how it's going to play a part in shaping our industry for the future. So today, we're going to talk about what is next for the career services industry and what does that look like for you as a job seeker perhaps, or as a career services provider? I get calls from people, emails from people pretty frequently, oh, there's this new thing, and it's gonna wipe us out. And it is always important for us to be looking at what's coming next and thinking about how we adapt to make sure that we stay relevant.

And I want to just talk a little bit about some history. So probably 10 years ago, people started talking about the death of the resume. I don't, I don't know how many of you around share it in the comments, where are you joining us from? And then also share a few started hearing this, right? What, how long ago did you start hearing that? You know, the resume was going to die. Resume wasn't going to be used anymore. There had definitely been changes in how things happen, but most of the established resume writing businesses that I know have had their busiest years yet in the last 18 months. The resume, and really what it means is helping someone tell their story, whether that's in LinkedIn or other platforms, but even the good old resume electronic, most times, these days, of course is having a heyday. It's not going anywhere.

And these are the things that when we look historically and then we look forward. We say, okay, we need to be ready. We need to be thinking. We need to be adapting. And we also can't run around like the, you know, the sky is falling because I'm pretty sure that the sky is not falling anytime soon on our industry. And I'd love to hear, you know, how many years do you think you've been hearing that the resume is going to die? Just, you know, your best guess how many years have you been hearing that? I'd love to just see what people have been hearing. The other piece of it, when we look backwards, is that there has been these huge waves of anxiety around some big service providers.

So we've had these huge rises of anxiety around big service providers and things that they're doing. So I think it was maybe six months ago that I did alive around the panic of LinkedIn rolling out their resume feature. I don't know about any of you, but I haven't had any clients ask about it. There may be people using it, but it really isn't that great of a feature. It's not going to write their resume for them. Right? All it does is take their LinkedIn profile and dump it into a resume, which is a very poorly formatted PDF. We had a huge rise of anxiety when they were going to roll out their interview prep service, which they have.

And I know people use it and it's a good tool, but it didn't take away business from the interview coaches that I know go further back. We had a huge rise of anxiety. Remember this thing that LinkedIn rolled out where it was partnering with Microsoft Word. And now you could pull from other people's profiles when you were in Microsoft, working on a resume. Unless you've been in the industry for the last five years, you probably didn't even know that that happened because it was this splash. And then it went away for whatever reason. It actually seemed like a kind of cool tool, except nobody wanted people pulling from their LinkedIn profiles. So a lot of people were going in and shutting that feature off. And then of course, when then the online privacy laws started to get more stringent, I believe then the toggle changed from turn it off to you had to turn it on.

No one turned it on. So suddenly there's no data for LinkedIn to pull from when we go even, you know, kind of further back or maybe around the same time. One of the job search services started offering a AI job, an AI resume review. And it's actually pretty good. It's about what you would have gotten from a lot of the resume mills. If you would have sent them your resume and you get the canned response, this AI response is actually probably better than that, because it did kind of grade your resume for certain specific things. Not too unlike job jobs scan does now and skill sorter or some of those other services.

What do we do every time we hear about these things? Well, we kind of freak out which isn't the worst thing, but then we think about, okay, what does that really mean for us? So now we've got coming on the scene, all of these AI tools and Kelly hit it just right on the head. AI has a long way to go. It was probably two years ago. One of our board members attended a big AI event. And they said, you know, AI isn't as far along as I thought it was in tech jam. We had them demonstrations from two AI tools that are coming on to assist with career. What I'm seeing those tools do, Bob's pretty cool tool. And you know, it kind of has that interface where it feels like, what did they say? It feels like an intelligent friend is what they're trying to get it to sound like and feel like it's pulling labor data and it's sharing labor data with our clients.

And then it also in Bob, there's that job search coaching drip, where it's helping people stay motivated and take action in their job search. Those are great things. Those are tools we can use. And in fact, if you're interested in partnering with an organization that's creating Bob, let me know, and we can connect you with them because it's a tool you can use in your practice. It is not going to replace what you do. Now, the thing we have to watch out for, and we talk a little bit about this frequently, is that really negative reaction that we might have of, oh, it'll never replace us when we take that approach. It's kind of like that, you know, talk to the hand. I don't know. And we don't think about what we actually do need to do differently so that it won't replace us. And we can sound a little bit defensive or, and maybe even naive figure out how you can use the tools in your practice, because then they won't replace you because then you'll know what they do, you'll know their limitations and you'll know how you add differentiated value to those tools.

The latest thing that I'm seeing now along the same idea of Bob is that LinkedIn is rolling out a career coach as well, an AI career coach in some of our college campuses. One of our board members over in the UK, her college campus is working with LinkedIn's career coach is very similar. So it's going to be great for those people who already know what they want to do. They just need some, you know, little pointers. They probably weren't our clients. Anyways, it's going to be great for those people that need labor remarket data, they still might need a coach to help them process it and figure out what to do with it is going to be great for people who just need a little tweak on their resume. Those are the types of people that these are going to be good for. And those probably were not our clients anyways.

And we can find, get, figure out ways to offer more value to those people. If we're using these technologies and understand what else they might need, we might create a course around how to implement the feedback you got from Bob, right? If we know what it does, we could capitalize even on the opportunities it creates because it's getting more people interested and involved in career conversations. There's nothing wrong with that. So it's a very cool system. Then we met CiCi the chatbot very labor market focused, you know, kind of you put in what you're looking for and it spits out labor data back at you via chat. It's great for that research phase, we could help our clients use it more effectively. They're still going to need help with the other parts. So maybe figuring out what to put in, because if they don't put in good input, they're just going to get a bunch of labor data.

That's not going to match anything that they're really interested in and they might need help figuring out what to do after they get that data. What I'm seeing right now in this AI space is that it's very linear. So I say, these are the jobs I'm interested in. And then it spits these things back out at me. If there's other ways that you're seeing and other tools that you're seeing that are more advanced, I'd love to see them and see what you're seeing, looking at the opportunities AI creates. Yeah. And how can we make that into a service because now there's going to be a whole bunch of people running around? Who've gone to their local workforce center and are using. So Bob is coming in is probably first and there may be a competitor here in the us, but I just don't. I wasn't aware of them.

But Bob is getting into the workforce centers. They were talking about in Bras in Belgium. I think the wait to see an employment counselor in some of those European countries is months, months. There is an opportunity for some industrious career services provider to come up with something where these people are waiting to see a person. Bob, isn't gonna fill that gap. It's going to help, but it can't fill that gap. And so there's opportunities there to create low cost courses or services that would pair along with a technology like that and help people use it. And then of course, you're creating that funnel. So these people get helped just from Bob. These people need Bob in a course or Bob in a support program. And then these people need coaching. They just need coaching. So I wanted to take some ideas of other industries and what's going on in other industries and how that might translate into our industry.

The other kind of red herring that people are contacting me about right now is these low cost or free resume services that some of the big companies are offering. That's been around for a really long time. Maybe not marketed the way they're marketing it. Now they're saying, you know, a free resume rewrite. We know what that looks like. And we know that it really helps some clients. Usually the clients that are already looking pretty good, it will help them. And that's great. It's not going to help our clients that need help with strategy. They need help figuring out where they fit in the market. They need help telling their stories. They're not going to do well with that free resume review. And my guess is that that free resume review is actually, you know, free and then an upsell or some kind of catch because no one's sitting there and rewriting a resume, even spending an hour on it because you just can't. Right?

You lose too much money and AI is not quite there yet. We'll talk a little bit about that here in just a second. So other industries, graphic design, if you've paid attention with graphic design, graphic design has really had, is an industry that has bifurcated. So now there are a lot of really low cost or even free ways that you can get a logo. When we were having a presentation during tech jam, one of the presenters talked about this site where you can go and you can get a color palette. You can get a, you know, and you can even get a free logo from them because it's just kind of AI created, right? You pick shapes and colors, and it does it for you.

So that's the low end of the market, your 99 designs, that part of the market. Then you've got the high-end market where it's not just about your logo, it's about your brand personality and I'm going to do a brand assessment with you. And it's usually quite expensive for, I mean, 2,000 plus to get a logo with these companies that also do the brand work. And I can see resume writing, especially kind of moving towards that model. We've got these low end or maybe even free services that do a template. They do a plug and play right, put in your information and we design it for you or answer a few questions and we put it into something for you. And it's going to be fast. It's only going to work for the people that don't really need the whole thing. Right?

They know who they are. They've got their stories, et cetera. I tend to think everyone could benefit from getting the stronger stories, but there are people that will benefit from a resume rewrite and probably something that technology can do. Then at the high end, you'll still have the same sort of resume service that a lot of you deliver today where it's that branded high touch, you know, do the interview. And I think this is what we can learn from the graphic design industry is that you could pick, you could even have parts of your company that play at both ends of the spectrum, but if you're in the middle. So if you're kind of doing that, you know, $500 resume where it's not really that much different than what someone would get, when they're automated, you need to be able to communicate how it's different from what they would get, if it was more automated or templated, and you may start moving towards that more high end, high touch, get some branding skills, get some coaching skills where you can have that more boutique feel if you're not going to go to that low end and, and kind of the plug and play help people.

And it’s still help. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with it. It's just two separate parts of the market. And I think we're going to see those parts separate, just like you have seen in the graphic design industry. So that's one idea I had. The other thing is to look at what's going on in marketing. And I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. So the resume and careers industry always tends to be a little bit behind, right? We're onto two-column resumes. They're all the thing. Three years after all websites went away from two columns, and now we're into the freemium model. When all of the marketers are saying that the freemium model died a year or so ago. Most people aren't doing free webinars to upsell. They're not doing free, even free giveaways anymore because that freemium model has had it today.

So when I hear, oh, they're doing kind of a freemium model for resume writing, that time has passed. You know, that ship has sailed and there may be a little window where they're gonna find a place to hit that, but then it's going to go away. Unless the freemium model tends to recycle, resurface. For some reason to stay tuned, we'll stay in tune with that. But right now, what I'm seeing is a lot of marketers talking about that, not being a thing anymore. And at the same time, the resume industry is saying, Hey, where did you get a freemium model? I'm not that worried about it. We'll see what happens. We'll keep our pulse on it. Thank you for letting me know about it. I don't think it's a reason to run around and think that the sky is falling. Then we look at the things that have happened in customer service.

Have you had a chatbot customer service conversation that made you want to pull your hair out? They figured this out that Ooh, chat bots were so cool. And then right there, there's probably like, Ooh, chatbots are cool. Oh, that's not working real well. And now they've kind of come back to this place of a human in the loop. So the official term, somebody, one of you pointed it out to me so that when you say, well, give yourself credit in the comments, human in the loop, human in the loop when you're doing a chat bot, because otherwise it gets out of control and people hate it. All of them, definitely for sure. Me. So I was trying to get a chatbot company that helps you with Facebook chat bots. And I responded to their chat bot saying I wanted to pay someone to help me create my chat bot and no one ever got back to me, right? There was no human in the loop. It doesn't work. So what career services that are moving towards chat bot or AI, they might be really cool for a little bit. And then the same thing's going to happen. That they're going to figure out, Hey, we need a human in the loop. And how could you position yourself to be that human in the loop? If it's something you want to do, if it's a place you think you want to play, you could be that, that human in the loop for this type of technology, because it's not going to go away.

People are going to keep experimenting and maybe it'll get better. It will get better. And it saves people time. It can answer those basic questions. I would encourage you to try a chatbot on your website for some of those basic questions, just to understand what the technology does to make sure you're the human in the loop. And you're coming into the conversation as quickly as possible, at least even just monitoring it at the beginning. So if you do have a customer that has a real question or has a problem that the chatbot's not solving, you can circumvent them getting frustrated. Like it sounds like many of you have been repelled my hair just to answer my question. So the other place that we're watching is coaching in organizations. So when I went to the International Coach Federation Conference in 2019, they were talking about some of these AI coaching tools being used in organizations who are interested in the conversation around that.

It was really talking about how it was for the lower level employees and trying to get everybody access. Let's pay attention to that. I'll go to the ICF conference again this fall to see what I can learn because they have more money, right? They have more opportunities to test those systems and we can learn from them. What's working, what's not working. What problems is that technology solving, what problems isn't it solving so that we can provide our service as the differentiated add-on to that technology. We want to be really careful not to say, it'll never do that. You know it, when we put it down, it just doesn't do much for us. We want to be knowledgeable. We want to give it credit for what it can do and then say, and these are the things that my services would bring into that conversation.

In addition to that, technology is going to be really important. As you're working with younger generations, millennial Z, even some X, they want to see that you are using technology to make your services more efficient, more effective so that they don't have to spend as much time with you on every little thing. And when you can do that and use technology, it helps your brand in addition to the efficiency and effectiveness and those things that it brings to your practice. And we talked a little bit about that when we were looking at the project management systems. So we had a demo from WriteSea, great system, especially if you have multiple writers in your organization and they've come on as a partner. I'm excited for their partnership. And then we also saw DubSado, different level, different functionality, great for a solopreneur, who's just getting started with the idea of project management.

They both have portals where the client can login and see your work and emails back and forth. It makes it feel more high touch, even while it's being automated. And, it makes it feel more tech aware than just sending emails back and forth. So those are things that we want to think about as we look at the way technology is coming into our world. We don't want to bury our head in the sand, but we also don't want to run around like the sky is falling. Let's find a good, healthy place in the middle, wherever, staying aware, we're making the changes that we need to, and we're doing the things that we can do to be more effective in the work that we do. That's really where we want to live. Right? We want to live in this place where we're informed and we're not dismissive, but we're also not panicking constantly about the death of the resume, the death of the cover letter, the death of, you know, all of these catchy headlines that don't necessarily give us what we need in our world in terms of reality.

And that's what I love to do. Right? I love to talk with you all and process with you all about what reality looks like in our space because it's so important. So someone saying that they had a chatbot on their site, but it slowed down your site speed, which is now going to be a thing with Google, right? That the new Google algorithm really doesn't like it when your site is slow. So it'll be interesting to see how those website chatbots transition to make sure that people want to use them because they'll adapt just like we adapt. And it'll be interesting. And as we experiment with things, we'll let you know. I'm going to be experimenting this week with AI created sales emails. And if you are a part of our industry, part of our customer group, you'll see some of those and I'll point it out.

I'll say this is, you know, this is written with AI because it's important for us to know what these tools do, know what their capabilities are and how they might play into our work. I don't know about you, but sometimes getting a resume started is the hardest part. So maybe there'd be an opportunity for us to use AI to get something started. And then of course, we have to come in and edit it. That's what I'm assuming that this tool is going to help me with. It'll be interesting to see how close it can get and how little editing I have to do, but it's just an experiment. And this technology is pretty new. So I don't see it taking our jobs anytime soon. Be aware of it, know how you offer that differentiated value. We are launching something very exciting this week.

We are launching it right now to people who are customers. And I'm doing this very specifically, because if you've taken one of our sessions, you know what we do beyond this lives, you might come to our lives and you think, oh, Marie, you know, gives so much information live. Why would I need anything else? And that might be totally true for you. If you want some more in-depth information, if you want some more tangible handouts processes that you can use in your business and a community that you can engage with, we have some new ideas that actually we had before COVID, but during COVID did not seem like the time to launch this. Instead during COVID, we did a lot of free things, which were fun. And we got to know you all. We got to build some great community and we love that.

What we're moving towards right now is launching our communities. So I'd love for you to join me in the CIA, the Career Industry Authority Communities. We've got three different ways that you can join. The first is a master practitioner. So this is for those of you who really want to be up on the new and the next in everything, careers from interviewing to recruiting to job search, what's going on, this is what we're going to be doing. So we've always done webinars, those skill building sessions. Now you're going to get all of those wrapped up into this program. You're going to get some additional sessions. We're also going to have strategy sessions, which means you can bring a client problem or a process problem. Anything that you are working on in your practice. If you work in a university workforce center, whatever you are doing in your practice, you can bring that to that strategy session, get feedback from me, but also from our community.

And this piece of it is really fun. I'm in a couple other memberships related to business where they do this, and it just gives so much opportunity for us to interact. Let's see if I can get to the next one here without all of these things opening, that's just not going to happen. All right. So the next one is all focused on business and the business piece of it is to help you grow your business. So those strategy sessions really be focused on your marketing. What are your products look like? What are your services look like? What are you trying to do in your business? And you'll also get the webinars that we do every, every year on the business sessions and those exclusive training on specific business, specific business issues every month, build some community, get you engaged in what we're doing and the webinars that we're doing that offer you great value.

So instead of now having to buy them all separately, they'll just be wrapped up into these programs. And a lot of you are doing that anyways, and you've been asking me for a way to kind of streamline it. So this is what we've come up with to help you streamline it. And as I said, right now, we're doing this to launch just to the people who've purchased from us in the past. So if you're like really wanting it on this, you can go buy one of our, you know, one-off sessions from the store. And that will give you an opportunity to try and see what you think. And then you could join one of these communities if you're interested. Now, I know some of you are in business and you are a master practitioner. So we've got an option that, you know, gives you everything, streamlines it down for you.

And we're going to do our strategy sessions. You can come to any, and all of those you'll get the nine webinars that we do every year on resume writing, coaching, branding, and business. And then of course, you'll get some sessions every month, just little things on the current topics. So we'll be talking about challenges. We'll talk about courses and we'll dive deeper than I'm able to do in these types of sessions or in our clubhouse sessions. Because as always we'll have handouts and tools for you to use and ways for you to interact with the community. I'd love your feedback if you're interested and, and joining us, and if not, maybe what it's missing or what you have questions about. We'll do a free, a few question and answer sessions this week as well.

It's only going to be open through Friday afternoon, Friday evening, and then it will close until we do our public launch this fall. So you'll get in at this price this week, or you can wait until the fall and we'll offer it again. So we'll send this out to you shortly via email, pending my five-year-old's ability to stay focused on something else and look forward to your feedback and thoughts on this as we launch it. Thank you all so much. And we'll see you next Tuesday looking forward to it. Yes. Awesome. Love it. Thank you all so much. All right.