Chapters
(00:00) Jansen Meyers discusses his nonlinear career path, starting from IT support and network engineering, transitioning into financial services, and eventually progressing into executive operations.
(04:02) Jansen Meyers had a nonlinear career path, starting in desktop support, then moving into project management and infrastructure work, followed by a transition to financial services and procurement, and later exploring the mortgage industry before returning to consulting.
(08:04) Jansen Meyers talks about his unexpected entry into financial services and the connections he made along the way.
(12:06) Jansen Meyers discusses how his career path was shaped by the people he worked with and the opportunities they provided.
(16:08) Jansen Meyers prioritized his family and created a leadership role to be closer to them, which eventually led to him taking on additional responsibilities and becoming a leader in IT and transformation at Centric.
(20:10) Jansen Meyers advises individuals to take their time in developing their career, be adaptable, and try different things.
(24:12) Companies should focus on talent rather than just skills and experience when hiring, as skills and experience only show what a person has done in the past, not what they are capable of doing in the future.
(28:14) Building a strong network and being your authentic self are important for career success.

Each week, we interview proven leaders from our network, to learn from their experiences, and share their Talent Attraction and Candidate Experience stories with you.

• Our mission is to promote the accomplishments of our guests
• Highlight the companies where they work and the services, and products that they offer
• Share success stories from their experiences and, most importantly
• Provide strategies for job seekers and advice to talent seeking to accelerate their careers.
  

Today’s guest is Jansen Meyers, Partner at Centric Consulting. Jansen began his career in end user support network engineering before progressing into project management and consulting. He’s developed a niche expertise in financial services and has advised numerous banks on marketing strategy and new client acquisition. Jansen shared many great insights including:

• The power of his personal network
• Intentionally taking less money, for the role YOU REALLY WANT
• Having a plan, but being flexible as opportunities evolve and present themselves
• Being authentic and building your personal brand will lead to more career options

From IT to Financial Services to Consulting: Jansen Meyers and His Nonlinear Career Path

[00:00:06] Ron Laneve: Hello and welcome to episode 30 of the Bell Falls Search Focus on Talent podcast. I’m your host, Ron Laneve. Each week, we share the career stories of tech experts and marketing mavens, operational gurus, and sales leaders to illustrate how they have navigated the nonlinear career path. 

[00:00:25] Ron Laneve: Today’s guest began his career in end user support network engineering before progressing into project management and consulting. He’s developed a niche expertise in financial services and has advised numerous banks on marketing strategy and new client acquisition. Over the last 14 years, He’s progressed into an executive operations role with one of the most forward looking consulting firms in the United States. I’m very excited to introduce my good friend, Jansen Meyers, partner at Centric Consulting.

[00:00:57] Ron Laneve: Jansen, thanks a lot for being here. 

[00:01:00] Jansen Meyers: Ron, thanks for having me. Really excited to be here. 

[00:01:03] Jansen Meyers: I am also a podcaster, so I’m really excited to see how someone else does this and how you navigate your podcast, because I’m looking forward to learning something today, really excited about that too.

[00:01:13] Jansen Meyers: I have a podcast called on in two, which is a golf podcast. I started it with a member that I play golf with frequently. We’re doing it as a passion project, which is something we’ll talk about today. I think that’s really important for most, if not all people to have.

[00:01:28] Jansen Meyers: So I do it for enjoyment and an outlet and passion has nothing to do with income or anything else. It’s all about enjoying the game and sharing ideas with other people.

[00:01:36] Ron Laneve: As you and I talked one of the common themes that continues to unfold for me in these conversations is, the concept of the nonlinear career path. And in your case, as I look at your background, and you and I have known each other for a long time, I’m going to summarize your career in 3 big chunks. There’s where you started out of school, let’s just call it an IT support network engineering. There was the transition along the path into financial services, which I think, obviously took up a, a big chunk of your career. And that’s where you and I met back in the day. 

[00:02:07] Ron Laneve: Then there was the. The progression into, I’ll call it executive operations. You had a pretty significant or still have a pretty significant let’s say human capital, a piece of your role too. So I think a lot of our conversation is very relevant, but can you walk through those three big segments of your career and talk about how those unfolded whether they were intentional decisions, whether they were pure chance, what impacted those moves? 

[00:02:33] Jansen Meyers: Absolutely. And it’s an interesting journey. I know everybody’s is different. I came out of school. With the structure of my career was like checking off a project plan, right? I literally had a list and a schedule. What job am I going to have at 25? What job am I going to have at 30? How much money am I going to make it 35?

[00:02:55] Jansen Meyers: When am I going to be CEO? And wow, you talk about getting smacked in the face. Cause I thought it was very much of you do A, and then you do B and then you do C and that’s just not how it worked out, but it worked out phenomenally well. I came out of school and one of the underlying themes you talk about, it’s very much about a nonlinear path, but it’s also about understanding how and why to make decisions at different points in your life.

[00:03:23] Jansen Meyers: So one of the stories I tell as we talk to recruits or if I talk to kids of friends when they’re coming out of schools is understanding why you’re making a decision and a little bit about not only what you want, but what you don’t want. You’ll hear me say that a few times today. When I came out of school, the majority of my education was in application development.

[00:03:44] Jansen Meyers: this will tell you how far this goes back. I had a lot of COBOL and CICS classes. I had one networking class, one. my first offer out of college was to do COBOL development. I knew I didn’t want to do that. I had a good friend that worked for a firm that they did desktop support and project management and infrastructure work.

[00:04:04] Jansen Meyers: I said, I want to work with you. So I took 25 percent less money to go do something I knew that I would like doing, I knew I would work harder, I knew it would help me develop my career, and that started me down the path of, as you described, the first third of my career. Which started in desktop support, it then grew into running projects for desktop support, which then grew into managing teams that did desktop and infrastructure support, and I learned a lot and I knew that I was at least in the right arena because I knew that I was doing something not only that I enjoyed, but I wanted to be good at.

[00:04:41] Jansen Meyers: I made that initial decision based on not only what I wanted, but what I knew I didn’t want. I started to find that was a theme in my career. The second third of my career was made for a different decision. Post 911, the market changed. I was laid off. I didn’t have a job.

[00:05:02] Jansen Meyers: I went to a bank in Cleveland now called First Community Bank, but it was Ohio Savings Bank at the time. I needed a job. I had a close friend, ironically, the same one who helped me get into the position out of college. I went to work with the same individual. He had relocated to the Cleveland area.

[00:05:21] Jansen Meyers: He was working for a bank and he called and said, I know you’ve been looking for a job. I know it’s been almost nine months. I was young. I had a young child. I’d only been married a couple of years. We didn’t really want to move, but he said, you need to find a job. I have the job that you would be really good at.

[00:05:37] Jansen Meyers: It’s different than what you’ve done, but I think you’d be really good at it. I’d like you to come meet with our CIO and interview. And that’s going to be one of the things we talk about later is you have to be willing to take a chance and I did. So I went and I interviewed for the job, which actually was running a portion of their it procurement organization.

[00:05:55] Jansen Meyers: I was in charge of managing the process for bringing in hardware and software into the organization. That was something I had never done. Now I knew I could do it because I had been on the vendor side, right? I started in the VAR, we call it VAR value added reseller channel. I understood or had set in the seat of the people we were buying from.

[00:06:16] Jansen Meyers: It gave me a good perspective to help build out the process to make the acquisitions. I hadn’t done it, but I knew I was capable of doing it. But that job came out of necessity. It didn’t come out of a desire to go into financial services or procurement. It came out of necessity in that I needed a job and I wanted to stay in the technology field.

[00:06:36] Jansen Meyers: While I was at Ohio savings I was in that role, about two years, 18 months to two years. A project management role opened up inside the mortgage division at the same organization. Again, didn’t have any knowledge about mortgage. I, I’ve done a lot of project management. I want to try something else, but I do want to stay with this organization.

[00:06:58] Jansen Meyers: I took that role, but I took it because it was building a skill in a different area. I was learning all kinds of things about the mortgage industry. All of these different. Processes that they have, but it’s still inside of financial services. If I look back to when I came out of college, I knew I wanted to do project management, but I never said, I want to understand loss mitigation and loan servicing and mortgage acquisition.

[00:07:25] Jansen Meyers: That just wasn’t on my list, but it was an opportunity to learn something new. This is where, when you talk about non linear path. I was there. In that role, about another two years, I was at the bank altogether. Four years decided I wanted to go back into consulting. I took a job as a project manager and I only had that maybe eight months when this individual named Ron Laneve calls me out of the blue and says, Hey, I’d like to interview you.

[00:07:50] Jansen Meyers: And I thought for what, who are you and where are you coming from? This goes to the taking a chance. I said I just took this job. I don’t think you’re probably really going to want to hire me away. You said, why don’t you let me figure that out? This firm I’d never heard of called Boulant says, we want you to come work in our financial services division.

[00:08:08] Jansen Meyers: I looked around and thought, whoa, gosh, I didn’t even plan to get into financial services to begin with and now someone wants me to come work for their organization because I understand financial services. Interestingly enough, one of the things I focused on was mortgage acquisition and processes, as well as client acquisition inside of financial services.

[00:08:29] Jansen Meyers: I had no idea that’s where I would end up, but to your point about just following the path helped me accumulate things that I didn’t even know I was going to need, but helped me end up in a good spot. 

[00:08:41] Ron Laneve: Yeah, no, that’s a fantastic story. Who was your first financial services client at Brulant?

[00:08:47] Jansen Meyers: First Citizens Bank out of Raleigh, North Carolina. I still talk to some of them today. I don’t talk to them quite as often as I used to, but every, six months, six to 12, 18 months, I’ll reach out to some of them, just to ask how they’re doing. I still keep in touch with them. I look back, that was was 18 years ago. So the connections that you make and the people that you interact with, it was great. 

[00:09:12] Ron Laneve: It’s funny, one of the things you mentioned earlier, and there’s a lot of cool connections in the progression that you made there. But 1 of the key things was there was an individual, who was looking out for you. It’s always about who you know, not what you know a lot of times. Not to steal your thunder, but I know in the next move you made. There’s a lot of who you knows in that as well. So can you talk about that? 

[00:09:34] Jansen Meyers: Absolutely. So my career progression became building momentum of individuals. And knowledge collectively that I was acquiring through my career. That is probably the best way I could say it. I was at Brulant I think three years we went through some organizational change. I knew I still wanted to stay in consulting I felt like I had probably reached the point that I needed to move organizations to be able to level up back to I knew what I wanted and I knew what I didn’t want. I said, I think I’m going to test the market.

[00:10:08] Jansen Meyers: I called an individual who had previously worked at Brulant. His name’s Mark Buchynski and I just said, Hey Mark, I’m interested in changing jobs can you point me in the right direction? He said as a matter of fact, this company that I worked for called Centric Consulting is hiring out of the Cleveland office.

[00:10:25] Jansen Meyers: And Mark was my counselor when I was at Brulant and he said Matt Dierker is actually there in the Cleveland office Well matt set two chairs for me in the office at brulant. Here I am reaching out to these individuals that I had worked with at brulant I called matt and said matt. I understand you’re looking for a Senior manager, project manager in the Cleveland office. Can you tell me a little bit about the role? 

[00:10:46] Jansen Meyers: Here’s where it gets really interesting about the, what, that piece sounds like that was the key, but it really wasn’t. I reach out to Mark. Mark connects me with Matt. I sit down with Matt and his partner in opening that office, Joe Smucny. We start talking about things I’ve done and type of work I’ve done and. I said we have a project we’re interested in putting you on, and it’s at a company at the time was called LPS field services. And I think it’s now called Black Knight, it had changed. And I said, Oh, really? Are you working with Sharon Fitzgibbons? You should have seen how big their eyes got. They sat back and they went. Yes then you must know Curtis Larson and I rattled off like eight people. All of these people were people I had worked with in the mortgage division at Ohio Savings Bank 4 years earlier because LPS focuses on the loss mitigation piece.

[00:11:40] Jansen Meyers: Ding that I didn’t think I was gonna need That’s what they focus on property preservation and loss mitigation and they just sat there and looked at me like How could you know that? And I said I worked with all of them and they said do you know Pat Gleasing and I said as a matter of fact he was the executive the CEO of the mortgage division at ohio savings And I worked directly with him as my sponsor for every project And they jokingly looked at me and said you’re hired.

[00:12:06] Ron Laneve: I never knew all this. That’s fascinating 

[00:12:09] Jansen Meyers: All because of individuals that I worked with literally over a eight year period from Ohio Savings through Brulant to here. 

[00:12:21] Ron Laneve: And you got to Ohio Savings because you were out of work and you needed to and somebody threw you a bone to help you out. 

[00:12:28] Jansen Meyers: And an individual that I went to college with. Which by the way, he’s now on my it team here at Centric. I’ve returned the favor, right? And I don’t want to say it that way he said I want to do something different and I said I have the perfect role for you but yes somebody that I went to school with helped me get the first job And then when I say helped me get the job introduced me to the hiring manager. And in the same situation when I needed a job Introduced me to the hiring manager and You That second job, not knowing I would end up in mortgage and meet those people became the way that I was able to get the next job when I wanted to make a change.

[00:13:07] Jansen Meyers: And that’s how I ended up at Centric. And I’ve been here, it’s March 20 As of March 19th, I was here 14 years. This is the longest I’ve ever been anywhere. And that came through my financial services expertise and the individuals that I met along the way and that’s how I ended up at Centric. 

[00:13:27] Ron Laneve: But this was all in your plan that you created back in college right before you started?

[00:13:31] Jansen Meyers: I would love to say yes, but it was not and what I learned as I Navigated my career and i’ve said this a couple times is making my decisions became less about checking boxes And more about knowing what is important to me and why am I making the decision and it became time periods in life Taking the job that I had to have was about being newly married And having a child who was literally six months old and I needed a job and I wanted to work someplace I was comfortable with but I needed a job. Coming to Centric was about knowing I want to elevate my career It wasn’t about not liking where I love.

[00:14:11] Jansen Meyers: I loved Brulant, I loved being there, but I wanted to do something different I knew what I wanted right and I knew I did not want to be in that role for another three or four years So I came to Centric. I will say that my first two years at Centric was the end of that second third of my career. I got into that spot Because of things that had added up over a 12 year period, not because of any one decision.

[00:14:37] Jansen Meyers: I think a lot of times people feel like, you get this phone call from a recruiter and you say yes, and then you get hired to be the CEO. Yes, we all recognize we learn things through our career. But the building process isn’t just what you’re learning, it’s who you’re interacting with, it’s what you’re gleaning, it’s how you’re navigating, and it’s your own ability to learn to make those decisions. It’s really critically important. I think that’s what we don’t teach high school and college students soon enough, is how to learn to make that decision for themselves and understand what they want. That’s really important in your career. Super critical. 

[00:15:15] Ron Laneve: I couldn’t have said it any better than that. So can we talk about that last 3rd? Now that you’ve been at center for a while, my understanding is, you’ve. Your role is, I’ll say, more internally focused and client focus. Is that right? Or is it some of both? 

[00:15:30] Jansen Meyers: It started client focused. When I came to Centric, as I started working on a client project, but my aspirations was to be a partner in the organization. In 2014, I achieved that I used to be a member of the Cleveland leadership team and that we call business units because we don’t have physical offices. We’re entirely virtual and we were entirely virtual pre COVID. We have been for 25 years. As I worked through that part of my career, I achieved what I would call my initial aspirations.

[00:16:03] Jansen Meyers: I made it to partner. I had an opportunity to lead and develop individuals. I was part of growing the business. I was part of owning a small piece of the business that felt like I had achieved at least in that area, what I wanted to achieve. But my life began to change again. If you go back to the beginning of the story when I said I had to take a job because I had a young daughter, now that daughter is now graduating high school and going to college and my life is very different. My parents are aging into their seventies and my dad’s still farms and they need help. I went to the leadership and here, I thought I wanted something. I thought I wanted to be the leader of that office. We called it a business unit lead.

[00:16:46] Jansen Meyers: That was the whole reason I came to Centric because I wanted to achieve that. When they offered it to me, I said, no, because I knew what was more important is I need to move home to be close to my family. So here I am I’ve worked for something, I made partner, but I’ve worked to become the business unit leader and realized, but that’s not the thing that’s probably most important.

[00:17:07] Jansen Meyers: It might be the thing I want, but it’s not the thing that’s most important. In that moment, you feel like you’re giving something up. I said, I need to move home. I was in Cleveland. I need to move back to the Dayton area. I need to be close enough to my family. I can help. I need to be in an area where I can be supportive.

[00:17:23] Jansen Meyers: They said, no problem. We’ll figure out how we handle that and I took the opportunity to create a position which someone else now has but I said hey I think we have a need in our organization for this leadership role and we talked through it for a couple months and I said absolutely, like that is a great idea and I Moved into that role, but I never actually got to do it because what happened is Now i’m available to them and there were multiple large projects and change initiatives and they just kept saying well before you do that, can you do this and You Oh, before you do that, can you do this?

[00:17:55] Jansen Meyers: One thing became three, which became five. And then those five became we need some additional leadership in our operational functions. Can you take on these three departments that we have? I just kept saying, yes, right? Absolutely. I can. That grew into having a leadership role inside of our internal operations. We have since reorganized, right? Because we’ve gotten bigger, I’m now leading our it function and our transformation office. When I created that other role. These things were never even on my radar, never even considered them. The roles didn’t even exist. Someone else is actually in the role I created, but that doesn’t matter.

[00:18:34] Jansen Meyers: That evolution that started with, I knew what was important to me and why I needed to make the decision gave me the clarity. To take the risk and accept new challenges, knowing I was still in the right spot. Those roles have grown and developed into a broader leadership opportunity, but it was still rooted in knowing what I wanted and knowing what was important to me.

[00:18:59] Ron Laneve: Kudos to Centric, as I mentioned earlier in my introduction, I call them, one of the more forward thinking consulting firms in the U S for a couple of reasons. One, because of everything you just mentioned around the ability to maybe craft your own role that has a lot of value add to the business.

[00:19:18] Ron Laneve: But also to do it, on, kind of terms that work for both of you, completely remote. Larry English wrote that, wrote his book, years ago about 

[00:19:26] Jansen Meyers: “Office Optional” Yeah, absolutely. He wrote that book and released it 30 days before the lockdown and the pandemic not knowing the pandemic was coming. We joke that it’s a guide on how to run an Office optional or remote organization, but we’ve always been remote. We’ve always been focused on the client. No physical office space outside of it as an office space where we keep laptops and configure machines, no physical brick and mortar office space to say, and we were progressive in that way. We were early adopters of what we call self managed PTO.

[00:20:03] Jansen Meyers: There is no number there isn’t two weeks and then you get to three and then you get to five. We said, you’re all professionals. Take the time when you need it. Make sure you’re managing your work right, and treat it like a business. 

[00:20:17] Ron Laneve: And we’re talking about a firm that started in the late nineties, early two thousands, right?

[00:20:21] Jansen Meyers: Ninety-Nine to 2000 was the start. Self-managed PTO came about in 2000, like 11 or 12, maybe 13 at the latest. It wasn’t in the last two years. That was early on. 

[00:20:33] Ron Laneve: Even the virtual thing. I remember, running into a lot of you guys at coffee shops and, different places around town and, saying, are you, what are you doing? And you’re like, Oh, I’m working. What do you mean you’re working? This is how you work. You get to do this. That’s fantastic. Very cool. 

[00:20:48] Jansen Meyers: They have been great in, not only can you craft a path in a world that has non linear paths, but we focus on retaining good talent. We are not about this person only does this role. It’s no, this person can do things really well. What can we put them in that the organization needs help with? That’s where career paths that are non linear, as you say, and organizations who know how to leverage those types of individuals, when that comes together, There is great synergy because you can be adaptive and flexible as the market changes, which is what we’re seeing right now.

[00:21:28] Jansen Meyers: Roles are changing for people because the market is changing and our company’s needs are changing. When you, as an individual get locked into, I will only do a certain type of work or the company gets locked into only certain people can do certain things. It makes it very hard to adapt as the market changes So that’s something I would say to people as they are thinking about their career learn to be adaptable because it is a huge asset and you will benefit multiple times from doing that.

[00:21:57] Ron Laneve: That’s a great transition. Can we talk about, 2 more kind of cohorts? I call them, the college student, or the, the individual entering the workforce sometime soon. What advice would you give to them? Not only from your experiences, but personally, but you also. A higher, interview and hire or have interviewed and hired a lot of these individuals, over the years. So what advice do you have for them? 

[00:22:21] Jansen Meyers: So it’s interesting because I said my daughter went to college. She recently graduated and I would start by giving them the same advice I gave her. One is just don’t be in a hurry. Say you’re 24, probably younger, but say you’re 24 and you might work till at least 54, maybe 64. You have the next 30 or 40 years to develop a career. You don’t have to develop your career the first 90 days out of school, what you need to do is figure out where do you want to start? Because we, as we’ve been discussing, it’s not about where you start, right? You can pick multiple starting points. Not everybody has the same opportunity. I’m not suggesting everybody needs to go walk about in Australia, right?

[00:23:04] Jansen Meyers: That’s not what I’m saying. Some students may do that. Some students may choose to volunteer. Some students may choose to take passion jobs, things they know they love to see how it develops. Some may say, I want to start in this chosen field and see how it goes. But the primary thing is. Don’t be rigid and in a hurry.

[00:23:25] Jansen Meyers: You have 30 or 40 years of career time. You will do multiple things and have multiple opportunities to try things. The second piece is try lots of things. Don’t be in a hurry and be willing to try lots of things. When I interview an individual I personally do not care what their degree is in what I want to know is What types of things are you good at? What types of things do you like to do? What types of things do you not like to do? Because if there’s things you don’t like to do and they’re a key part of the job I probably won’t hire you but that’s okay because we want it to be a mutually good fit. And then why do you want to be here? Why do you think this is the place for you?

[00:24:13] Jansen Meyers: I mean once I read their resume once I personally never pull it out during an interview. It is a discussion. Tell me why you think this is the place for you. Tell me what kind of job you want. Tell me what kind of things you like to do. Because my mind then starts to process not what can I do with them today, but what could I do with them three years from now? Because I see something that maybe they don’t even see. But I’m like, I could start them here, but I see what they have and I can develop them. Not I personally, the company, we can develop them to this because you’re always thinking, how do you grow your organization? Not how do I hire and plug somebody in, but how do you grow your organization?

[00:24:54] Jansen Meyers: If you’re an individual who’s not afraid to try things and try lots of things and you’re not in a hurry You’re likely more willing to take a job that will develop you more in the long term than what’s probably the best answer today.

[00:25:09] Ron Laneve: Your description do you think that applies only to a consulting or a services type of role because of the continuous, change in, different opportunities you get day to day or should, does and should non consulting organizations think that way too? 

[00:25:28] Jansen Meyers: I think non consulting organizations should think that way. I think too many companies are focused on skill, not talent. I don’t like using professional sports as an analogy, because it’s very cliche, but let’s think about professional sports. Skills matter. But scouts are looking at talent. What are they capable of? Not what are they doing today? Because nobody that comes into a professional level sport can perform the way they need to that day.

[00:25:54] Jansen Meyers: But the scout looks at them and says, no, I know they will be able to perform at X. As companies, too many companies are looking at skills and experience. What you did in the past just tells me what you’ve been able to do. It doesn’t tell me what you will be able to do. And I can’t even look at a resume and tell how well you did it. I can just tell you were there when it happened. 

[00:26:16] Jansen Meyers: I want to assess in the discussion. What are you capable of doing and what talent do you have? What comes naturally to you? Are you articulate? Are you adaptive as the conversation changes? Or I throw questions at you that I always ask. I try to ask one of the most bizarre questions I can think of because I want to see how they catch it, receive it formulate a response and respond. I don’t mean bizarre, like it’s not relevant, but I asked them something that I expected they would never be asked in an interview and really good candidates it doesn’t even phase them. 

[00:26:48] Jansen Meyers: They’re like, Oh I hadn’t thought about that, but I would say, and they’ll answer and the level of thought and processing and articulation and their answer tells you a lot about the individual, and I think those types of interview scenarios and being able to, I’ll say assess, we say score, but assess that objectively tells you something about the individual.

[00:27:14] Jansen Meyers: I worked with a lady who was part of our people and change practice, and she always said, when I interview someone, I try to think, would I want to be stuck in an airport with this person for 12 hours? Because if I wouldn’t probably don’t want to work with them and that’s probably true.

[00:27:30] Jansen Meyers: Yeah, because you’re gonna spend a lot of time with this individual. It doesn’t mean everybody has to be nice But you know when you’re interviewing as a candidate the most important thing I would say is be your authentic self because if you’re not you’re going to end up in a job you probably don’t want and they’re going to end up with an employee. That’s probably not a good fit. 

[00:27:49] Ron Laneve: We talked about college students and those entering the workforce soon. What about, any new or different advice for experienced people, how to win the interview, how to get through the application process? Anything you’ve ever seen that’s differentiated one candidate from another that’s stands out in your head?

[00:28:07] Jansen Meyers: A couple of things. One is I would carry over the advice from college students and about being your authentic self. People can tell, right? Just be you, because if you are, I’m more comfortable if you’re all, you are your authentic self, regardless of whether you may be somebody I would have dinner with.

[00:28:26] Jansen Meyers: If you’re your authentic self and I’m like that personality and those attributes would be a good fit for this role. That’s what needs to come out. And it’s really hard because as I told the stories, it became clear how you need to network and, create connections and maintain connections. It doesn’t mean you have to reach out to all of these people every day, but you need to be very cognizant of what you’re doing and who you’re interacting with because my grandmother, who’s 96, started telling me at the age of 13 and 14, it’s not always. What you know, it’s often who you know, and that’s not to say that person can give you a job, but they may introduce you to somebody who introduces you to somebody.

[00:29:08] Jansen Meyers: That is very important. It also starts to be an indirect way in which you build your personal brand. And we know today your personal brand and the breadth of your network is more important than the skills you have because people are going to Assess you. I won’t say judge. They’re going to assess you at some point based on that.

[00:29:32] Jansen Meyers: When I say your network, I don’t mean how many LinkedIn connections you have. I don’t look at that stuff anymore. I want to know, who do you know that I know? And what would they say if they were sitting here with us. Or they would be willing to say, I don’t have a job at my company, but I have a buddy that, I hang out with on the weekends and he’s been talking a lot about this need that they have. And I think you’d be a good fit. I’m going to call him and I’m going to tell him, Hey, you need to talk to Dave over here. You need to talk to Pam and see if they might be a good fit. 

[00:30:00] Jansen Meyers: Regardless of where people are in their, I’ll say career journey, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Don’t be afraid to reach out and continue to build your network and always be your authentic self because that will win out. The other piece is be willing to try something That you didn’t maybe think was a fit but after you have the conversation you may realize that’s a really good fit.

[00:30:27] Jansen Meyers: You may be in financial services or you may be in the insurance industry but come to find out working for one of these dental organizations is a great fit because I learned a lot in insurance and I can translate to that type of organization that may have never crossed your mind. So to those later, I’ll say later or farther along in their career, don’t ever turn down a phone call.

[00:30:49] Jansen Meyers: Take the call. Conversation. Like with us today. I’m learning how you run your podcast. Take the conversation and learn something from it. Make a new connection. Even if you’re just practicing. 

[00:30:59] Ron Laneve: Yeah. Back to your point about taking my call back in the Burlant interview days, right? Who knows where the path would have led you today. So 

[00:31:09] Jansen Meyers: the other thing is be patient in this market. They’re going to have to be patient. 

[00:31:13] Ron Laneve: Yeah. 

[00:31:13] Jansen Meyers: It’s going to take time. I think I read the other day. Jobs that used to take three to four months are now taking nine to 12 months to acquire something to that effect.

[00:31:24] Jansen Meyers: I don’t remember the exact number, but it was more than twice. It was like two and a half times the length of time to acquire the job and just have to be patient. 

[00:31:34] Ron Laneve: Yeah, no, that’s a great point. That’s a great way to end this. There’s a we’re definitely in an age of massive disruption now.

[00:31:40] Ron Laneve: We You and I have seen it multiple times in our careers. But this one just feels a little bit more impactful than all the others who knows how long it’s going to take to shake out. So patience is definitely a key right now, but appreciate that. Jansen, I think we’re going to have to do a part two eventually, cause I think there’s a lot of things that we chipped away at, but didn’t totally unpack.

[00:32:02] Ron Laneve: I thank you for your time and really appreciate it. 

[00:32:05] Jansen Meyers: Thanks for having me really enjoyed it.

April 15, 2024