 Hi everyone, I'm the Managing Director of a couple of recruitment and HR consulting businesses foresight in the Hunter and Central Coast and Penrith personnel in Greater Western Sydney. I did psychology at university and then travelled for a year. I had some interviews with foresight and they suggested I try the recruitment industry which I thought why not and and here we are 20 years later and I still love it. So to be involved in the the engine room of business which is people it's it's the it's the heart and soul of business every business doesn't matter how automated the business is there is still a human element to it somewhere and to be involved in the people the people's strategy the planning and just the human element that goes to that it's it's an honour and I still love it and hopefully I'll be saying the same thing in another 20 years. My answer for finding a job be it to change industries or to remain in your existing industry is roughly the same and don't get me wrong. There's a ton of information online about about job search and building a resume and using social media and I don't want to rehash that for you, but I do want to highlight what I think is the best advice I can give you and and that advice is to treat job search like the toughest job you've ever had. Job search as you all know is not just scrolling through job boards. That's a 10-15 minute exercise. By the time they hit job boards, they really are dealing with the masses in terms of a volume of applicants. You're becoming one of the herder quickly and don't get me wrong. People get jobs as a result of that. So I'm not downplaying the importance of that, but it needs to be only one element of your strategy and certainly if you are trying to change industries then the level of creativity, proactive thought that you need to put into your job search must be heightened and I'm talking about the the research that you need to do into the industries that are employing in the geographies that you want to work and really making some decisions for yourself about the skillsets you have that are transferable, thinking specifically how they might apply to those industries that are employing and then adjusting your resume to ensure that those transferable skills are highlighted in your resume. But it goes beyond that. You've done the research in the industries that you think tick those boxes. You found the companies that operate in those industries in the geographies that you want to work. You then need to find the contacts in those companies and you need to find out a bit about those contacts. Who are those people and not just their contact details, but where have they come from? What's their background? And have you got a network that may, even if only two, even if it's two, three, four degrees of separation, have you got a connection there that might enable you to more personally connect with that person? So didn't your neighbour once have a girlfriend who used to work at that company that based on my research here is in an industry that seems to be busy right now and I think my skills might apply? Contact your neighbour, find, check with him or her, their ex-girlfriend. Make contact with that person. These are the layers of research and creative thought, innovation and going that 1% extra that is going to help you be it staying in your industry or changing the industry. And of course, once you do all of that research, it's in about making contact with that relevant person and then bring all of that research to the table. And I don't mean in terms of a half hour spiel, I mean in terms of selecting the most powerful things that you've learned through your research, preparation, conversations with your network, that you think is going to give us, give you your best chance of nailing an opportunity the moment you make contact. Be it telephone, email, social media, some other way. And then of course, be absolutely ready to follow that brief communication up with a really concise and powerful statement about what your relevant skills are. Regiment, LinkedIn profile. And then once that's happened, it's following it up with a courteous follow-up call that again just checks in and demonstrates how you are, without being annoying, how you are more motivated, more ready, more skilled, you know, more informed on what they do as an industry and their challenges, more connected in terms of relationships that you may or may not have, however distance they are, distant they are. It's a tough job and my advice to you is to treat it as a really tough and long hours job. So I've got three top tips for working from home. One is you need a schedule and there's a couple of reasons for needing a schedule. One is because it helps you ensure that at the end of a day and indeed over the course of the day, you are staying on track to the objectives you set out to achieve that day. Now you could argue, well that should apply for every day. I think when, regardless of working from home, but I think when you're in a work environment, you're able to go with the flow of work that's happening around you. You know, you fit into other people's projects and agendas. You fit into conversations that picks up on where you left off last week and working from home, you miss those patterns. So I think an agenda or schedule is more important when you're working at home, but it helps in another way as well and that is to align what you're doing with the people around you in your home. I'm sure we've all experienced it where you're trying to get peace and quiet because you've got concentration that's needed for a particular task for the next couple of hours, but you know your kids are on there, online recess or something else for your flatmates is going on around you and tension can happen really quickly when you're out of alignment. So if you're creating a schedule, you can also align that to others in your home, in your dwelling, and you can ensure therefore you're capitalising on other things like the social interaction that can happen when you're all having a break at the same time or all having lunch at the same time or having some sort of a downtime or in contrast some concentration or focus time. The other one is Zoom meetings. My personal opinion is you need more Zoom meetings but for less time. Zoom can only do so much of the heavy lifting of face-to-face interaction and I think we have, we get so much of it at work you know around people's desks in the hallways making a coffee in the kitchen which you get none of at home and I think we try and jam a lot of that in to two dare I suggest three hour Zoom meetings and they are hard, yacker and I think a better solution is to have a higher volume of Zoom meetings but for less time and you know they can therefore they only need to cover two or three quick objectives for 20 minutes great guys hey let's check in again at 4.30 and we'll catch up for another 10 minutes rather than trying to jam 17 topics into a heaven forbid a three hour Zoom session and my final tip for working from home is exercise which you can weave into your schedule for me personally balance and productivity includes exercise so prioritising that even when you are working from home is important so I'm an employer and I must say I've asked myself this question every day over the last two to three weeks and my best answer is transparency and communication we were we've been very fortunate we have a working a culture style that is already very transparent and communicative but don't get me wrong we raised that up a notch in the last two to three weeks but that was a really great springboard for us to be able to do that and I mentioned in one of my recent LinkedIn posts that I communicate with our employees like I communicate with my account and that's not for a moment to suggest that that's about laboring them with whatever you know stress or or detail that is unnecessary for them it's it's far more positive and constructive than that and it's it's about giving our employees to the best of my ability the visibility and control that they need to feel a little more secure in what the future could look like and as importantly where they fit in that story and and what is is about what they do that can give us every chance of success um so transparency and communication