Debunking Online Career Advice: Navigating the Noise with Dan from HR

Ever felt like you're being led astray by the so-called 'HR influencers' on social media? That's what we're unpacking today with our guest, Dan from HR. He's here to help us navigate through the noise and bring to light the pitfalls of misleading career advice rampant online. We take a deep dive into the unscrupulous tactics employed by these influencers, who are often exploiting young professionals' career aspirations for their gain. 

Fight bad advice with good humor, that's Dan's motto. He's on a mission to debunk harmful career advice, one viral post at a time. We also take a peek behind the curtain of Dan's unique pricing strategy for career coaching and how he cleverly uses chat GPT technology for crafting irresistible job advertisements. Get ready for an insightful discussion on the potential of AI in resume building and how, with just the right prompts, it can be a powerful tool in your career arsenal.

How do we trust in a digital age where everyone is trying to sell something? Dan shares his personal story of being accused of monetizing his audience and how he navigated those murky waters to build trust with his followers. We also delve into the murky waters of social media's influence on career advice and how the onus is on us, the consumers, to discern credible advice from the fluff. Join Dan and us on this enlightening journey that's sure to leave you with loads to ponder about, and perhaps, a renewed perspective on how you approach career advice online.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Had you actually read the email, you would know that the podcast you are about to listen to could contain explicit language and offensive content. These HR experts' views are not representative of their past, present or future employers. If you have ever heard my manager is unfair to me. I need you to reset my HR portal password. Or can I ride up my employee for crying too much? Welcome to our little safe zone. Welcome to JDDHR.

Speaker 2: 0:50

Welcome to JDDHR, the podcast by two HR professionals who want to help you get through the workday by saying all the things you're thinking, but say them out loud.

Speaker 3: 0:58

I'm Warren Daniel very nice to be here. Thank you for inviting me?

Speaker 2: 1:03

Yes, absolutely. As you can hear, we have Dan from Dan from HR. That's a little bit awkward to say Dan from Dan from me, dan from HR. Anyways, if you haven't followed him on Instagram or all the social medias, please do. It's an absolute right. Some of this stuff is just drop dead funny, but it has a tend. You have such a tend to seriousness and funniness. You mix it really really well and it's a lot of fun.

Speaker 2: 1:32

I'm not a social media guru, as any of our listeners can attest to. I've actually been trying so hard to break my social media habits. I'm doing fairly well. I do check you out on Instagram regularly. I won't say all the time, because I'm not on all the time anymore. I'm not good at it. I think it was like two weeks ago. An article came out on HR Dive. I read one paragraph into it and I said, oh, this would be the perfect topic from Dan for HR to espound upon. Because I'll just go tell about the article. It is HR Dive, october 27th, by Carolyn Christ, in the title of Gin. You know her.

Speaker 3: 2:13

No, but I want to send her a note after this.

Speaker 2: 2:19

Gin Z. Millennial workers say they turned to TikTok for career coaching. What made me think of you is because there are so many career advisors out there on TikTok, on all the social medias. I would conservatively say 75% of them are full of shit. I think that's a conservative estimate. I'm just thinking how many of these people are just getting taken by these HR? Everybody wants to be HR influencer nowadays. I remember my children now in adults, but I remember when they were younger, oh, I wanted to be a YouTube star. That's what they wanted to be. When they're growing up, Inflatworks are on TikTok.

Speaker 3: 3:06

Well, he needs a pretty face in a 15-second clip and some bad advice, some bad advice Exactly.

Speaker 2: 3:14

I don't follow too many career advisors because once my BS meter goes off, I unfollow and subscribe. I'm done with them. One of the things you've done pretty hilariously in the past is you've bumped some of this bad HR advice out there. Let's start off. Why do you? Yeah, let me one guy, you will not believe it. Your, I am Daестre CEO. Do you think I hesitate to use scam? But I do think it's a scam to a certain degree? But do you think these are just people who don't know enough and know what they're speaking about, enough to be intelligent and helpful and they're getting paid for it, but they're not really delivering a good service because they're hey, I can make an easy buck on social media doing this or do you think it's a scam? Or what are your thoughts on that end of the world?

Speaker 3: 4:05

I put them into three different categories Okay, intention and knowledge. If you don't know that you are causing harm and your intent is to mean well, but you don't know what you're doing, you just sort of took a $150 course to become a career coach, because that's the thing. You can pay, $150 to become a career coach, and they tell you how to put them in these like LinkedIn posts and whatnot, then I consider you not too harmful. I consider you misled, I consider you misguided, but I don't consider that harmful.

Speaker 3: 4:33

On the opposite side of the spectrum is you know, you do not know what. You know that you are not an expert in the things that you're talking about and you know that you are manipulating people and you are an asshole and a scammer. They're to be called out. And that's on the far right side. I guess the one, the one in the middle, would be the.

Speaker 3: 4:52

I've met a few people who are they think they're doing well but they're not really that aware, or like they're sort of confident, like I find that there's a lot of people in the middle that have ever created them for maybe a few years, or like are their agency recruiting, so they they touched enough about it. They're not necessarily giving bad advice, but they're still manipulating the that sort of emotional drive and they're sort of utilizing their recruiting or their two years of HR experience say, oh no, I'm an expert versus like to really understand how corporate network works and the hierarchy and the job family structures and all of the things that go into promotions, development, open roles. It just it takes feet on the ground and it takes a lot of work to understand how it all works together.

Speaker 2: 5:32

Absolutely, absolutely. And and here's another thing I find is problem, and I've spoke about it on the podcast before so many people want to get into HRs. They're the people, people and they don't really understand and know what HR is. And then they get in and maybe they get a cush job somewhere and they think, oh, this is so easy. I, I file these papers and I help Susie with her benefits and I help Jason do this, and they don't get the full HR concept of what.

Speaker 2: 6:02

Everything that is involved in HR, from the beginning to the end, and people don't understand how much goes into. We're going to hire somebody. From the time a manager says I need to hire somebody, there's so many steps about what role, where they go to fit in the organization, not even before we even get talking about salary. We need to define the role, define everything. It's just there's so much more to it and that could be a whole podcast in itself, an episode itself in talking about what goes in, before we even post that job on LinkedIn or Indeed or any of your favorite other channels, before you even get to that mark, because it's not just like willy nilly, okay, let's hire someone, it's not in. And then, yes, sometimes you post jobs if you're.

Speaker 2: 6:52

I call it fishing. I don't necessarily intend to hire someone. I want to see what's out there and if I find the right thing, yeah, we'll hire them. If I don't, you know, I'm just fishing. I'm looking seeing what's available and it does. We're testing the waters, more or less, and that happens sometimes too, but I just I don't know. I think HR is just such a career that people are drawn to without knowing exactly what it is and it causes so many problems that it ends up causing problems down the road multiple ways. I agree. So out there, what is some of the worst At hr advice you've seen? I know you get tagged on videos on tiktok and everything for it and then you comment on them. What are some of the just the absolute worst, shittiest advice you've seen? Go out there in the the interwebs world.

Speaker 3: 7:45

Oh, my god, there's some, there's, there's me, I think. One is the the don't answer the salary question when the recruiter asks for your salary Expectations. Like there's so many people to don't answer the question and said ask how much the budget is like. Do you understand that? You're actually screwing yourself by telling people to do that? Additionally, the on the resume side, it's everything from the put the job description in one point font. So did that with your resume and then in the interview to do you have any questions about my candidacy, as like? Your final question.

Speaker 2: 8:19

Yeah, yeah, I would agree. There's the salary question and that's probably comes up the most of things that I see out there and as a recruiter, I cut my teeth in HR recruiting. It was IT in the 90s, it was fast and fun and it was. It was crazy. But I the person who mentored me and developed me taught me about pre-closing and salary is one of the things you had to pre-close your candidates on. You had to get them. You didn't have to have a number, you had to get them within a range, and so many people would want to leave that Blanket.

Speaker 2: 8:56

I and we wouldn't ask specifically ideally, what are? The question was ideally, what are you seeking in terms of salary and a salary range? That's all the question was. And if you said, as long as you weren't giving me between zero and $250,000, I was probably going to accept it if you gave me a reasonable, well thought-out range. But the pre-close and the reason you pre-close is so you can hold it against them as you're trying to close them. Hey, well, we gave you the software, we'll give you 10% more than what you said and hey, this is an awesome offer. You know, sign, sign now type of thing.

Speaker 2: 9:30

But the, the salary negotiation and then the, the last one you mentioned. What do you, do you have any concerns about my candidacy? I that, that's like Putting a wet blanket on that whole interview. I don't know if it's an hour, two hours, three hours that you've been interviewing that day and you just what? What are your concerns about my kid?

Speaker 2: 9:50

Don't make them start thinking that, hmm, maybe I don't like Warren as much as I liked I thought I did. You're opening your diggier engraved with that question. I don't know, people are people are crazy with those type of things. Now, do you think now we have a regular section on J to HR podcast where we should on generation Z and some of its intentional. Some of it is just they, they bring it on themselves and you don't quite have as much gray in your beard as I have in mind, but Do you think it's more a generational thing that they're good that they're turning to Tic-Tac and others social media sites for this career advice, or do you think that it is? It's just easy to find and anybody it's not just generation Z, it's, it's everybody out there looking at these career advice I.

Speaker 3: 10:49

Would probably go with the latter. I myself Downloaded tic-tac in late of 2020 and I had the same impression that everyone did that it was a dancing app.

Speaker 3: 10:57

But, tic-tac aim like to come to you in sensation of education. Not only did I start making content and you develop a reputation for for making meaningful content there, but I learned a ton from, from real experts, like people. It was so egalitarian, like if you are an expert in Mexican cuisine, all you had to do is sit in front of a computer in Guadalajara, sit down, show off, show off some plates, and here here's a Mexican cuisine that I made and, like you, have just this, immediate access to it, and I don't think we ever had something like that before. So I think that I think certainly the intent of the generations may have may have been different, but I think it just became so much more than what the creators originally intended it.

Speaker 2: 11:40

Oh yeah, tic-tac is just grown out of this world. I was on tic-tac, I watched a lot of it. Then I'd find myself getting to the point where the little dude comes on says hey, don't you have something better to do? You've been on tic-tac for two hours because you could just flip oh, next, next, next and next thing you know they're telling you get off. I'm like, oh yeah, I've probably been on two hours, that I feel like it's been five minutes and and things like that. So that that was part of my own demise. So tic-taco helped me kick tic-tac habit.

Speaker 2: 12:07

I still have my account, I just don't. I've never posted anything, except for one jaded HR tic-tac video which my daughter did for us and she moved away. So now she doesn't do that anymore. Now, in in your mind, what is going to help? You say you're this person that's looking for a career advice and you're looking at all of these Experts in quotes that are offering career advice. What would you tell someone like, say, a Gen Z person who has limited experience and life, the universe and everything, that they don't know how to look for somebody that they're going to really trust their advice? Because, honestly, some people can make a shit sandwich sound really really good.

Speaker 3: 12:58

And that's really the the the dark side of this and how there are several influencers and I hate that term, but there's several big voices in the millions of followers that have no authority, no credibility, no experience whatsoever. There's one in particular and I was looking at her videos the other day and I'm like you've got to be kidding me and she was the whole skit that Jade put together was always negotiate your first offer. And like she was playing out this skit and like the person was like, oh hey, I just got this offer. And she was like, oh, you're gonna negotiate. And she was like, oh no, I didn't want them to think I'm pretty. And she was like, no, it's your first job.

Speaker 3: 13:32

85% of Americans negotiate and studies show that if you negotiate, you'll get. It's the difference of a million dollars of her lifetime. And I'm like, looking at the comments, there were people that had PhD in their title asking her questions Like it is as well, because everyone else has agreed this person is an expert. Oh, they must be an expert, but this person is in film and TV. They have never worked one day in an office. They have no idea how compensation works. They've never worked in HR. They never extended an offer They've never negotiated, like as someone who is representative of the person who signs offers and counter offers, like I'm the one you're negotiating with in many cases, or someone like me, but to sort of see someone just smiling and saying, yeah, take my advice, I don't really give a crap the fact that I'm gonna totally ruin your finances and get your offer pulled because I could just monetize you for my audience.

Speaker 2: 14:21

Yeah, I just I don't get it. Now, what type of services are people? Because the next part of this article is that people are paying for these services and on the article here it says most often paying between 500 and $1,500 for services, and I I know someone that I would absolutely trust my pay and trust to do my resume for me and without any sweetheart deals, it wouldn't be anywhere near $1,500. I think that that, unless you're starting off with just zero or I will say I worked in the education arena in some of those educational resumes are lengthy, like maybe, if you have one, this ten page educational resume resumes you should talk about all your research and your publishing and da da, da da. Okay, but for the average Joe, what do you? What do you? Are you those people getting is?

Speaker 2: 15:23

An article actually says about 11% of respondents to the organization's October survey said they paid tiktok creators for career coaching, most often paying 500 to $1,500 for services offered. And Wow, wow, yeah. So what do you think that people are getting? What, what? There? There's some. You yourself you do career coaching services for people, you do some resume writing and what, what, what just tells us the all the services that you offer out there?

Speaker 3: 16:02

you know it's funny is that I developed a reputation for job search content and the reason why I got into the job search space is just because I know how important it is. People and as someone who experienced career nirvana being an HR business partner for electronic arts, like doing a job that I love for a company that I loved in an industry that I loved that was something I kind of wanted everyone to experience. And being a business partner and knowing you, you had the keys to the secret kingdom. You know how all this works because you're the one that helps put it together. And so when I started making content, I wanted to talk about the kind of the more fun things about HR I want to talk about, like workforce modeling and organizational design and then leadership development and like and and how a structure starts to move and change and how you, how to utilize compensation strategy and how analytics and HR data could work. But I had to start with job search because there was so much misinformation and it was just disgusting.

Speaker 3: 16:53

So I hate writing resumes. I hate doing LinkedIn reviews, but I know I'm really good at it and I know it's important to a lot of people. But my whole pricing element and I know I make this needlessly complicated for myself, but like I price based on the person. So to me someone who's like a 25 year experience marketing director at Tech company in San Francisco for billion dollar company, that person's gonna get my highest rate, which I think caps have, like seven hundred dollars an hour. The cheapest an hour is like seventy dollars an hour. That's like a college student one year out with nonprofit, with like two years of experience, so that that one's only gonna take me two hours. This one's gonna take me five hours. But like the idea, the concept of charging things like college students are charging people. I just don't know how it works and you just manipulating them and probably using chat, gpt and urban legends and urban myths, you write resumes that don't really matter because you don't. You have no understanding of how these job families work.

Speaker 2: 17:46

It just drives me nuts, oh and the thing with chat GPT resumes and chat GPT job descriptions. Honestly, they're getting kind of good. I was working with our recruiter. We picked our toughest job that I worked for an engineering and technology company we have some very unique positions and we took the toughest job to fill. We said we gave it all the right prompts and it spit out a job description, job advertisement that you, right off the bat, was like 90%. There we had to do some tweaking. I was like whoa, this is good and I can only imagine it gets better for it. And we only used it that one time just for S's and G's to figure out how does ChatGBT does work for recruiting and whether it's something we want to do. But we were both like thoroughly impressed when we came out with a 90% of the way for their product. It just needed some tweaking for our individual business and it was great. And I can only imagine maybe I'll play a ChatGBT one day and have it create a resume. I don't know what sort of prompts he would give it for that, but I'd have to figure that out. But yeah, it's amazing, it's only getting better.

Speaker 2: 19:01

And then are we going to have something that, like professors apparently have this tool now that they can tell whether your papers were written by ChatGBT. It gives you some sort of likelihood of how my son in college was telling me about that. There's this thing it gives him a likelihood from how likely it was to be written by AI and I thought that that was interesting as well. But I do think in the future maybe these AIs will learn your tone and the way you write and the way you communicate. If it gets enough of a sample size, it will know how to write it in the way that Dan or Warren or whomever would write it once they have enough info to feed it in. But that is where I think we're getting into.

Speaker 2: 19:43

A scary. Scary realm of things is how easy it is going to be for people to do very little, because I do think effort is part of putting a resume together. The effort, what you want to include, what not to include, limiting yourself. You worked at McDonald's for three years. You don't need to have that take up six pages. You just need to get the basics in there that we can understand and know and appreciate and how it's useful to us now as you're looking for a new job. So I just find that side of things fascinating.

Speaker 2: 20:21

If you've heard the podcast, I'm fascinated with AI and where it's taking us in HR and it's really interesting stuff out there. So I don't know if we ever got to the answer here. What are we going to look for to determine whether somebody's just full of shit and popular, as you said, because they've got a million followers, so they must be right, or to, oh, this person really knows their stuff? I can probably count on one hand how many people I follow, and I probably follow more people through the J2HR Instagram account than I follow on my own personal Instagram account. But, like I said, I see so much crap it comes up in my feed and then it's like, nope, that's full of crap and I just move on. But Tosh, for someone who doesn't know how to sift through the noise out there, any pointers for them?

Speaker 3: 21:20

My thing is this I've developed this reputation of bullying people and people think that people have blocked me or that I'm mean to people, and I really don't want to come across as negative. I don't want to persuade anyone. Not for making content, but as an entrepreneur for three years, I'm really bad at it. I have started to talk about. Both of them failed. Both of them went bankrupt.

Speaker 3: 21:42

And that was because I'm bad as an entrepreneur. I've never done it before, so the first few times have to be bad. But the one example I use is that there was one email marketing campaign that I did in my first attempt at entrepreneurship which all of a sudden my open rate went from 0.8% to 37% and it actually converted like nine sales and I'm like I've got gold. I have no idea what I did Like. This is like 47 emails that I had sent. I had no idea how any of this worked and I tried something and it worked.

Speaker 3: 22:15

Now imagine if I go on TikTok and say I'm an entrepreneur, I can guarantee a 37% open rate. I can guarantee one and three conversion. You have no idea. One, why would I ever think to do that? Because I'm not confident in that. Or two, if I'm that unscrupulous, why are you following me? And three, you deserve to be fooled if you're willing just to take a stranger's and people have a stranger's saying oh, here's how I get this job at Google, here's how I got a 33% conversion rate. So I always encourage people. Linkedin is an open website. The first thing I do anytime anyone's had me in a video, anytime anyone wants me to review information is. I look at their experience on LinkedIn. If they don't have experience in HR for several companies and it has to be like the HR that deals with job, family and organization, design and responsibilities and performance management if they have no experience in HR, recruiting or hiring manager, I become immediately a suspect. What experience do you have that qualifies you to be giving career advice and, doubly so, to charge for it?

Speaker 2: 23:17

Exactly. I do believe that maybe part of it is just Darwinism. You're going to get fooled, you're going to get fooled and you're going to realize you've got a piece of crap out of your little $1,500 services from someone you found on TikTok. I just I don't know. But also here's another thing, and as a parent of college age and adult children, listen to your damn parents sometimes, especially when they're in HR I'm sitting there career coaching my daughter how to do things. So no, no, no, no, once a go.

Speaker 2: 23:54

Okay, well, I'll be here after for to help you with the aftermath of that, but anyway, well, now do you think there I hate to put the word regulation on there, but do you think that there's a appropriate way to debunk or just disavow these bad actors in the game, the ones that are truly scamming folks out there? I mean, they get millions of followers and it's easy. Well, not easy. I don't have a million followers, but it's relatively easy to get a million likes and followers if you know the right buzzwords, if you're a cute young person that has a cute smile and is all bubbly, it's a lot easier than some old bald, gray haired guy with a go to get a million followers. But is it is the answer to start reporting these people? Or? But a lot of its opinion and you can't really.

Speaker 2: 24:56

They're saying this is how they believe to get your foot in the door at your favorite company or something like that. How is there more people out there debunking and tagging hey, this, this account is just full of shit. Here's why here's my top five reasons why this account is full of shit. And go on that and just do that I, but of course that's that's going to get likes for the wrong reasons. Because you really, I want, I don't, I hate to see as jaded and cynical and awful of a person as I can be. I don't want to see anybody taking advantage of or lose their hard earned money. Especially if you're looking for a job, you probably don't have a lot of money to start with, and then you, you shell out a couple hundred dollars and you get bad advice or I don't know what the. You get scammed, you get taken advantage of, right.

Speaker 3: 25:48

You know, I there's no easy way to do it and the the the worst part was, as I said before, like this is not the most interesting part of my job, but I I started to post that I do would do resume or LinkedIn reviews as like a passive income and whatnot. So people started to accuse me of doing it as a way to gain business, which was like one of the worst. I'm like no, don't hire me to do resume. I hate doing resumes but like I know how to do it and I'll probably do it much cheaper than this person. But it became oh, he's only saying that because he's a hater, he's only saying that because he wants your business it comes to.

Speaker 3: 26:20

Someone on LinkedIn had made a comment when I had made one of my ranting posts saying you know at what point is a buyer beware, like. At some point the buyer has to accept responsibility and I would like to get to a point to where me and others like me have to stop calling it out because they're angry clients are feeling powered enough to say this person's scamming out of my money. Do not recommend.

Speaker 2: 26:40

Yeah, absolutely I hope. I wonder, though, how many people are too embarrassed to say, ooh, I just got scammed, or I paid $500 for this. You know, I could have done this myself, I could have, I don't know. I just I hate the thought of that, but I also hate the thought of regulation. So there's, I guess there's no real good answer, and that's sort of the answer to everything on social media. There's no good answer, just flame on everybody at that point. Well, well, dan, is there anything else you would like to add? That about getting career advice from quote unquote influencers on social media?

Speaker 3: 27:22

The one thing I would have to. I recommend to everyone and I felt like I tried to be very transparent as possible. When I got big enough to where I was getting sponsorship deals and sponsorship opportunities, I recognized and realized and understood that I had the ability to monetize my audience and I'm okay monetizing my audience if they're okay with it and provided that I'm offering value. So if I'm going to give you like free resume LinkedIn compensation how this all works I'll start releasing digital content whether or not they're eGuides, courses and whatnot at some point over the next year, but I want to make sure that they're valuable. But you should know that once I have this threshold, I can monetize you because corporations now see me as the ability to influence purchasing habits.

Speaker 3: 28:03

I think me being just so upfront about it really helped build trust and I feel like there's so many people, like there's one influencer that will go unnamed but they classify themselves as your BFF as a way to build like a parasocial connection, and then they will go ahead and give really, really crappy career advice because they feel like you're connected to them. And this person again has no hiring experience. What to speak of has never been hiring manager, has never done recruiting, has never done HR, but is happily monetizing their audience. Because why not? Because she's down in either what they want to hear or what they're afraid of.

Speaker 2: 28:39

I like that, what they want to hear or that are afraid of I like that. I I haven't ever I've thought of what you want to hear, but I hadn't thought about what, what you're afraid of I, that's. That's what's up, that that's good. So, dan, before we close out the podcast today, what? Where can everybody find you? Obviously, I know very well your instagram. Where can we all find you? And I'm gonna put these links in the show notes when the best places to connect with you?

Speaker 3: 29:07

It's Dan from HR across all socials. My new tiktok is be Dan from HR, because I'm in the middle of an appeal process and I have a Dan from HR comms store coming live in the next week or so.

Speaker 2: 29:18

Oh, cool, cool deal, and so those notes will be. Those links will be in the show notes. Be sure to check them out. Thank you very much for joining us today. I like said I got a paragraph into this. Okay, it's only like a paragraph article, but I got like a paragraph in. I thought this is who's going to speak very well to this topic and hopefully, hopefully we can help some people out there not get scammed, and find the right people and do exactly like you said Check them out online, check out their linkedin profile. Are they like I think? Use example line is a college kid who hasn't even graduated yet giving career advice. It went to found this linkedin profile.

Speaker 1: 29:58

Oh yeah.

Speaker 2: 30:02

And it Do your homework, don't just pay oh, you know, they're pretty faced with a nice smile and have a million followers. Hey, don't just just some buy into that. Do your homework and and make the best decision, uh, of what you can. So that's all I have got for today. So once again, thank you so much for joining us. I think we can hope to have you back at some point if we ever have a pertinent topic to this, because I think you'd be A good, good resource for us down the road. And if there's anything we can do for you down the road, let us know. But wrapping up the show today, our intro is the voice artist, andrew Culpa, and our intro outro music is the underscore orchestra devil with the devil. As always, I'm worn.

Speaker 2: 30:46

Thank you very much so, daniel, and we're here helping you survive hr one. What the fuck moment at a time.