187. Gen-X deserves better: How to create your dream career over 50, with John Tarnoff
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It's over. You're never going to get another job. You're 53? Oh, you're done. And this advice that you should just pack it in is toxic. So first of all, accept that ageism exists. The fastest growing element of the U.S. workforce is over 60. You're more than your resume, right? You want to be the single solution to someone's problem. Putting senior director of marketing

is not going to help you. All it's going to do is get you searched by recruiters who are looking for senior directors of marketing. You're going to go up against a zillion other senior directors of marketing. You're more than that. The resume is a document of the past, right? It tells them nothing about what you can do for them in the future. I'm buying from you, John, if that's what you're saying to me. On Monday morning, he calls me into his office. Without looking up from his desk, he says...

Today's your last day. We're going to escort you out. It was one of those dizzying moments of abject humiliation. And I was just completely crushed by that. Because what does that say about me, that they would fire me this way? Right? It must mean that on a certain level, I'm a piece of shit. Stop chasing job openings and start building relationships.

Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. We are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a chartered occupational psychologist. My name is Al. I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you create amazing workplace cultures. Yeah.

Yes, we are. Today we are joined by a career transition coach and TEDx speaker, John Tarnoff, who specializes in helping professionals over 50, well actually technically 45 upwards, reinvent their careers. John has seen it all. He was famously fired from 39% of his jobs in Hollywood before pivoting to become a respected executive coach. Now he helps others navigate what he calls the purpose portion of their careers. With so much focus on early career professionals,

We too are guilty of rarely talking about the challenges facing experienced workers, despite them making up the fastest growing segment of the workforce today. The research is pretty clear. We're living longer, which means we're going to work longer, but organisations are still scrambling to fill skills gaps, replace experienced talent, and many are overlooking one critical factor, ageism. Despite the growing number of older workers, age discrimination remains one of the most persistent and ignored forms of workplace violence.

bias. So could this so-called talent shortage be a problem of their own making? Well, in this episode, John offers a refreshing perspective on how leaders can rethink ageing, tap into the potential of experienced professionals and design a more fulfilling and inclusive second act. At

After spending an hour with John, I soon realized that he turns conventional wisdom completely on its head. Instead of seeing age as a liability in the workplace, he shows how it can be your greatest asset. So maybe you're an older professional and you've been ghosted during job applications.

Perhaps job hunting has been really tough and you're wondering, what am I doing wrong? I've got all this experience. Or maybe you're told time and time again that you're overqualified. Very, very common. In the next 45 minutes, John will help you overcome each and every one of your concerns. It is...

interesting and it is so practical this conversation so after this very short break join us and we'll discover why the key to career success after 50 might not be chasing job openings but building meaningful relationships instead

Al, you've spent hours on Tumblr, haven't you? Yes, I have. I'd jump on for just like five minutes and look up and it would be 11 o'clock. Well, guess who's just solved a huge problem for Tumblr? Mm-hmm, I think I know the answer. You do? It was HubSpot. HubSpot to the rescue yet again. So this is what happened, right? Tumblr needed to move fast to produce trending content.

But their marketing team was stuck waiting on these engineers to code every single email campaign. And Al, you know how engineers want everything to be perfect. Well, fast forward to today and they now use HubSpot's customer platform to email real-time trending content to millions of users in just seconds. And the impact? Well, it's had three times more engagement and double the content creation. Very nice. I know. If you want to move faster like Tumblr, visit HubSpot.com.

Welcome back. Let's go and join Leanne and John as they demystify the job market for late career professionals. Oh, and we'll find out why John has been fired for so many jobs. My name is John Tarnoff. I live in Los Angeles, California. I am an executive and career transition coach, and I focus primarily on mid to late career professionals. So that is generally speaking, 45 to 55 and up.

people who are hitting what I call the purpose portion of their careers, where they have learned all of the good stuff, they have achieved a certain amount of success, and now they are thinking in their life and their careers, what's next for me? I kind of dine out on the fact that in my own career, my prior career as an entertainment studio executive and film producer, I was fired 39% of the time, and I

Came to that calculation kind of as a joke in a TEDx talk that I did about 10, 15 years ago, which was really the beginning of this coaching practice. And I was kind of searching for a justification for why I was up on that stage talking about people and careers and that.

I did the math and realized that in all of the jobs I had had in entertainment, which is, as we all know, a very volatile industry, I'd been fired from seven out of 18 jobs, which came to 39%. And I thought, let me throw this out there. And of course, I got a laugh, a nervous laugh, because, I mean, who talks about this stuff, right? But for my purposes in trying to reach out to people who are experiencing their own career challenges, it seems to me that

You know, you want to be working with someone who knows what you're going through. So let's talk about your clients. Typically, professionals are in their mid-career onwards. And when we talk about professionals over 50, which isn't very often, I think there is a lack of conversation about that, which is why I was so keen to...

to have you on the show. I'm curious, from the people that you work with, what are the main fears and worries of this age group of people in terms of their career? Primarily, they feel that they are ignored, overlooked, and dismissed in the job market. They kind of acquire this kind of chip on their shoulder, not because they're intrinsically defensive about what they do, but they

they feel that there are so many disconnects between what they want to offer and how they're being received and how they're being perceived. So there is a real sense of kind of reality disconnect between how they think the process should go and how it may have gone for them in the past and how it's going for them today. And we can talk about some of the concrete steps that

build this sense of distrust and, excuse my French, what the fuck is going on here? And what the fuck is going on here? Well, the number one thing that's going on here is people are getting ghosted. And this is not new to anyone in the job market. It's not new to Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, boomers. I mean, everyone's getting ghosted. And that is something which just completely...

I think shocks most professionals who have some success, some experience where they were taught you got to get back to someone, right? Even if it's to say no. And the fact that they are applying to so many positions and feeling going in like, okay, I've been in this field for 20 or 30 years. I have all these accomplishments.

can't I at least get a call back or an email back? I mean, much less an interview. I mean, if you're not going to interview me, at least thank me for the submission. All right. So that begins to erode one's sense of confidence. And people start to think, well, what am I doing wrong here? I mean, I feel like I'm doing all the right things. I've got a great resume. I worked with a resume coach. I've got a cover letter. I've done the research on the position.

what's wrong here? So that's where it starts. And it just kind of goes downhill from there. Bringing in the maybe the voice of the recruits or hiring managers very briefly who might be thinking, I'm really busy, John. I get so many applications. I don't have the time to go back to everybody. What do you say to that? No excuse. That is not an excuse. I'll tell you why. If you purchase a product online,

Even if you purchase a product in person and you give someone your email address, you can be sure that you are going to receive a series of nurture welcome emails from that vendor, that marketer, that brand to welcome you into the product, to familiarize you with how the product works, to present a whole customer experience for you.

that is designed to retain you as a customer, to give you that sense of loyalty to the brand. It's all automated, right? Why are recruiters not doing the same thing?

Why is a candidate not receiving an email that says, thank you very much for your submission? We are swamped, but are doing our best to get through our backlog and get back to you with an answer within a reasonable amount of time. Two days later, you'll receive a second email saying, so sorry, we're still working on your application. And

We may require some additional information. Please send us this. Or you may receive an email a few days after that saying, thank you for your patience. We are so sorry. We're not able to move forward with you at this time, but we really do value your expertise. And here are some tips and tricks that you might consider. Here's some more information about our company. We hope you'll consider us for the future. We do have openings that recur for someone with your qualifications.

Parenthetically, the way the email knows what your qualifications are is because the ATS system is able to pull and parse out some of those questions. So a smart ATS system is going to say, OK, here are the top points. All the reasons why they're being rejected are also the reasons why they can be maintained in the system and communicated with.

So come on, right? There's every reason to develop a relationship with each and every one of the applicants to your job posting, just the way a marketer will develop a relationship or try to develop a relationship with a customer. I'm with you. It's why I work in recruitment as an organization psychologist and the candidate experience is something that I'm constantly having to talk to organizations about, about how important it is.

These things are slipping and changing. And I'm curious, in terms of the over 50s that you work with, what are the shifts in recruitment, in hiring practices, are they also struggling with? Aren't what they were used to perhaps when they started to join the workforce? I think there is a sense of overwhelm for people who have been in one job or just a few jobs for

for the last 20 years, people who have been, let's say they've been working for the last 10 years in a job. And I see this a lot, and you can see this when you look at the LinkedIn profile. There will be a few jobs at the beginning, then there will be maybe one long job, then a second long job. Then usually about five or 10 years ago, that job ended and you see a series of shorter jobs in the interim.

And then there is now a gap, three months, six months longer. I see this repeatedly as a pattern. And what's going on is that the methodologies that people have used to go into this succession of jobs is failing. One of the persistent reflections I get from people I work with in their 50s is I've never had so much trouble getting a job. It never used to be like this.

either someone would approach me or I would, if I would, if I was laid off, it would take me a few weeks to kind of get settled, to find a thread of another, another position, multiple positions. People would interview me and I would, within a month or two, I'd have something else. What's going on? Is it a case that for some people at this stage, it's just

too late to reinvent in their career, too late to jump into another job so easily, or is there something else going on? It is never too late when people, and this is the advice, I use the term advisedly, that is given to many people. It's like, oh, oh, you're over. It's over. You're never going to get another job. You're 53. Oh, you're done. You're done. Just, you know, figure something else out, retire early, take what you got and go.

that message gets louder and more strident as people get closer to 60. And this advice that you should just pack it in is toxic. It's really bad advice. And it is mean-spirited. And it is inaccurate. So, yes, that's part of what's going wrong with the culture. What's gone wrong with the culture is this expectation that people are going to retire.

In the boomer generation, there has been this statistical marker where something like 10,000 boomers in the U.S. are hitting 65 every day in this cohort from 1946 to 1964. And I often see that statistic characterized as 10,000 boomers a day are retiring from

which is inaccurate. Just because they hit 65 doesn't mean that they are retiring. But this association between age 65 and retirement is so embedded in our culture that writers don't even understand that they're making a biased assertion, when in fact, the fastest growing element of the U.S. workforce is

is over 60. There are fewer people being born in the younger generations, fewer people available to enter the workforce. So we used to have this pyramid, right, where it was thinner at the top, people were retiring and dying off, and there are a lot of people coming up to replace them. That graph looks more like a cylinder today, where you have equal numbers of people in the workforce at all these ages. So companies are not going to have as easy a time replacing people

the experienced older workers at the top with a multitude of candidates coming up from the bottom. So something's got to change around that. And I believe what needs to change is that employers need to think about a multi-generational workforce, not a stratified workforce, because older people and younger people can work extremely well, do work extremely well together, and are addressing different problems.

Younger people typically will bring energy, innovation, fresh ways of thinking. Older workers will bring wisdom, experience, insight, and strategy. Working together, that's an unbeatable combination. To address the massive economic challenges of disrupted supply chains, business models, AI, everything that's coming down the pike.

We need all hands on deck. Is it short-sighted of organizations as well, though? Because you said like once you hit, people are hitting 50, they're starting to feel these struggles. We know that as humans, we're getting healthier. We're going to live longer. Probably going to, you know, the gens that are probably going to live to 90, 100 on average. If we're retiring at 65 and written off at 50, that's half of our life.

that we're saying isn't workable. Not only is it short-sighted on the employer part, but what I'm seeing more on the candidate side is people thinking, oh my God, do I want to spend... Well, if you're going to retire in your early 60s, number one, what are you going to do to 90 that's meaningful and purposeful? And how are you going to afford it, right? I mean...

Most people do not have enough money saved for a retirement that does not factor in inflation. And when you put inflation into the mix, plus all of the, I mean, look at the crazy volatility that we're experiencing right now.

You need more than a savings account. You need more than a pension. You need more than a fixed figure that you are trying to either grow a little bit or draw from a little bit to keep you going. You need to be working as long as possible, as long as you're healthy enough to work and able mentally to work.

in order to be able to sustain and survive a 30-year retirement or a 30-year additional longevity. And you mentioned in terms of potential people over 50 getting this feedback that you're done, now's the time to slow it down, a clear sign of ageism. Are there any other signs of ageism that people might experience either looking for work or in an organization? The most common ageist trope is, I think you're a little overqualified for this position.

Or don't you think you're a little overqualified for this position? Right. And to be fair on the employer and the recruiter side, their fears are pretty much as follows. If this candidate is applying to a job that they have previously done, will they get bored? Will they be frustrated at taking directions from a younger boss who does not have the same level of experience? Yes.

who is maybe doing this job for the first time. The candidate has done the job repeatedly. What is the level of commitment from that candidate to that job? Is this a stepping stone? Is this a circuitous way into the company to get a higher level position? Should that hiring manager be worried that the candidate is gunning for their job? I understand those questions and they are not unreasonable questions.

However, they do not necessarily apply. And here's what I say to my clients about this. I explain the point of view that they may be encountering and the why, because they see this as being very unfair. Their reply very often is, but I need this job. I can do this job. Why won't they let me do this job? I've done this forever. What? And I said, well, here are the problems, right? Here's what they're thinking. So they're

You as the candidate need to allay these fears and you really need to kind of search inside yourself and say, is there any truth to their objection? What is your motivation for doing this job? Because if your motivation is out of all the work that I've ever done, all the leadership, all the skills that I've learned, this job actually represents what I love to do. And at this point in my life,

I've climbed the ladder. I've had those jobs. I've been in those positions. I've had that responsibility. I've had that headache. I've had that stress. I don't want it anymore. I'm at a point in my life where I'd much rather serve someone else's agenda and use my experience and wisdom to help them be successful. That's what motivates me at this point. If that's the case, then you have to sell that to the hiring manager. You have to dissuade them

from all of the fears and the biases that they have on their side and reassure them that not only are you not a threat, are you not a flight risk, are you not there for nefarious reasons,

But you provide more value because of your experience, because of your focus, because of your dedication to that job. It's not a stepping stone for you. It's not a stop along the way to a higher position that you're using as a younger professional to climb the ladder. No, you want that job. I think that's a very compelling argument.

that a candidate can make to a hiring manager. And, and all of a sudden maybe the sky opens up and the hiring manager goes, Oh my God, what a gift. What a gift to have this person with all of this value and experience plus their ability to mentor and support others on the team. What a gift to me as a manager to have someone like that, who can really be kind of my, my, my, my wing person, my Ed DeComp, my, you know, my number two on a certain level culturally with the team.

I mean, it's such an amazing opportunity for a win. And is this what you mean when you tell your clients to focus, divert their focus away from ageism and towards adding value to an organization? Yeah, I think we get distracted by the ageism argument. And I am absolutely part of this cohort of professionals in this space that are calling out ageism regularly. And I think it's obscene.

and unnecessary and stupid. And at the same time, I don't think that that's a way to get a job, right? And I really encourage people when they are posting on LinkedIn and they have been out of work for a long time and they are frustrated by this, don't take it out in public on LinkedIn.

Don't complain that you've been out of work for six months or nine months or a year or three years and you've made all these applications and no one's getting back to you. Don't share that information. As much as you want the comfort and support of other job seekers, of other peers on the platform, the people you are looking for to hire you are also reading these messages, right? And if you are whining about your situation,

And the fact that you haven't been hired, they will probably say, well, there's got to be something wrong here. You know, stay away from that person. But if you're looking for a job, you want to bypass ageism. You want to not, you don't, you don't ignore it. You, you strategize around it. And the way you strategize around it is to define the value that you provide to

and the deliverables that you have delivered and are offering to potential employers, clients, if you're going to go into consulting, and really focus on the value. If you start by focusing on the value, really define what it is that you stand for and what it is that you deliver. That gives you the platform to connect to more people who are

potential clients, potential employers for you, potential recruiters who need what it is that you offer. So that is the basic process that I think is much more important than continually applying to open positions, which is going to be frustrating because, first of all, who knows how many of the positions that you apply to are real positions. Many of them are ghost jobs.

And you're going to get this ageism problem where they look at your resume and the ATS kicks it out. Don't think that by hiding your age, by hiding your dates, that they're not going to figure out how old you are. They will. If they are ageist, they will find you and they will reject you. So there's no getting around it. I will say on the other side, I have worked with some people in the past. I don't tend to attract them for whatever reason, who...

are who push back, who basically cling to this identity and to this privilege and this sense that, and they'll say in our initial strategy call, I will either see their eyes glaze over when I start talking about the self-reflection process and the need to kind of reevaluate their identity and reevaluate where they are and focus on their value and, and

Some of them have even said in the past, look, I really just want to get the next job. And I will say to them, well, then I'm not the right coach for you because I don't focus on the next job. I focus on the rest of your career. After this short break, we'll be back with more of John and Leanne. Do not go anywhere.

Leah, do you know who I think is awesome? Me. Well, yeah, of course. Yes, of course. But also my long-term hero and former guest, Joe Thea, who's the host of Hustle & Flowchart podcast, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. Of course. I remember when you booked Joe as a guest last year and you were so excited. Yeah, he's just an awesome guy. I've been listening to his podcast since about episode 100, long before we joined the network. And I tell you what, if you like systems...

mindset tweaks, reframes and strategies to actually enjoy the process of being in business. And this podcast is right up your street. Now it's true. Joe does love talking about building business systems, which isn't entirely my bag. But when you bear in mind that he loves talking about these systems so he can work less and live more, I'm there for it.

He also has loads of guests I know our listeners are going to love too. Yeah, like episode 644 with a guy called Robert Glazer, who's an author and an employment expert. He's advocating for a new way to manage the resignation process. He's got a book called Two Week Notice and explains why two weeks notice is the wrong way of doing things. And well, obviously, I'm not going to spoil the surprise. You need to go listen for yourself. Episode 644 with Robert Glazer. Listen to Hustle and Flowchart wherever you get your podcasts.

What a beautiful value proposition, by the way. I'm buying from you, John, if that's what you're saying to me. And I think it brings us perfectly on to my next question, which is in terms of that value proposition, in terms of that pivot. If I'm hitting a point in my career where I'm not getting the job offers I used to, I'm not as fulfilled by the high pressure hustle type jobs, I am more than happy to be managed by someone younger because I want that different route.

How do I go about navigating that transition, figuring out the roles that I'm going to be good at, I want to do, and I'm going to find fulfilling? Great question. And to me, it starts with four questions that you want to ask yourself. And these questions are not, they're not my questions. They are the four questions that are in this

Japanese concept of the ikigai, I-K-I-G-A-I, this Japanese concept of life's purpose. And it's been translated in the West kind of colloquially into this Venn diagram that you'll see if you search for it, which poses these four questions. What do you love to do? What do you do well?

What does your world need? And that's kind of my revision. The Ikigai Venn says, what does the world need? I think that's far too lofty. I think you have to focus on your world, you know, your profession, your industry. What does your world need? And what can you get paid for? And if the intersection of those four questions is the beginning of your search for that revised value proposition that you're going to ease yourself into, you're going to explore the

you're going to iterate, you're going to prototype it, you're going to look for opportunities to engage as this new person, this revised person, this updated person, this second act version of yourself, which I think is actually who you are. It's really going for, it's really an integration of all of the stuff that you've been on the outside with who you've become on the inside. And I think to be able to

integrate that and to express that, define that, and come from that totally integrated place as a professional is unbelievably powerful. So there are two concepts that, for me, underpin my whole philosophy about career. The first one is the career you want is already inside you.

you know on a certain level, deep inside you, who you are, what you want to do, how that expresses. You need to connect that inner knowing with your conscious mind. So self-reflection, daily journaling, conversations with close advisors, meeting new people, having more conversations to really figure that out. But then the second element is

is in order to create the future, you have to reconcile the past. We all have baggage. We've all burned bridges. We've had people do us wrong. We carry that baggage with us. And after 20, 30 years in the workplace, you know, you build up a lot of experience. Things go wrong, right? You blow a deal. You blow a relationship. You get fired. You get betrayed. All these things happen. You got to clear it.

Because if you don't clear, forgive the bad guys, forgive yourself, accept the reality, you're going to bring that baggage into every job interview, every client meeting, every engagement that you have. And people will say, hey, Leanne is great. Love that meeting. She was great. There's something about her. I can't quite put my finger on it. It doesn't all come together.

What percentage of the clients you work with have done this type of introspection before? Here's the dividing line. When I get on a call, on a strategy call with someone, and I lay all this out, there are, I guess, three kinds of people. Obviously, the first kind are the ones who go, oh, I get it. Blows my mind. Let's get going. The second type is never really thought about this before. Makes a lot of sense.

I don't know if I'm ready to go there. I feel like I need to. There'll be an excuse. I need I need more money. I need more time. Let me see what goes on with this job. I've got some interviews that are coming up. Let me see what happens with those. And then there's the third group, which is going, oh, OK, that's interesting. Let me think about it. Goodbye. So it's kind of a normal range that you would expect.

Right. Because what I'm offering is not your kind of typical career coaching process. And it grows out of my own background because I was always a seeker philosophically. I was always kind of looking for the meta behind what I was doing through all my years in Hollywood. And then, you know, I'm a meditator for 40 years. So I'm kind of used to thinking along those lines. I want to dig a bit deeper into that if I may. I mean, you've mentioned a couple of bits about the personal growth.

career challenges, pivots that you've been through? Is there a certain story or anecdote that really resonates with people when you share it? The worst firing experience that I've had, which I think kind of bonds me with everyone, is this job that I... I kept this job off my resume for years because I was so humiliated. And I took the job for the wrong reasons.

I was in a kind of a vulnerable position. I had been working with a small company, a couple of friends of mine had started this company. They asked me to join them. I worked with them for two years. It was fine. It really wasn't what I wanted to do. And at the end of the years, we kind of both mutually agreed there was time for me to go. And I was rushed by a guy who ran this company. He said, we'd love to have you join our LA office. He was based in New York.

The guy in the LA office, I found out, had no interest in me or hiring me, but was kind of forced into hiring me. Six months, pretty much to the day that I was there. On a Monday morning, he calls me into his office. Without looking up from his desk, he says, today's your last day. We're going to escort you out. You'll get your check in the mail on Friday. And that was it. And I just, it was like, it was one of those moments

dizzying moments of abject humiliation. I did the perp walk. I had to go back. It was a big open plan office. Must've been 50 people on that floor. And I went back to my office and I literally, it's like out of a movie, right? Packed up my satchel and walked out and everyone was kind of like not looking at me. And you know, all these guys that 20 minutes ago I had walked in, Hey, how are you doing? How was your weekend?

And I was just completely crushed by that. Now, I shouldn't have taken the job in the first place. I realized that, but I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to own that I had had that kind of experience. Because what does that say about me, that they would fire me this way, right? It must mean that on a certain level, I'm a piece of shit. And then I realized through years later that I really needed to put that job back on the resume.

that I really needed to own the experience, that I needed to reconcile the past by acknowledging what had happened and admitting to myself that I had made the mistake and that for whatever reason he wanted to fire me, it didn't really matter because that was really not the job that I wanted to do. It really was not the job that I wanted. So what that leads into, that story leads into for me is this idea that when you're looking for a job,

There's this tendency to think, okay, let me look and see what's available. Oh, I can do that job. Or I can do that job. It's different, but, you know, I can shave some of the experience differently and I can do that one. It's not really using all of my skill sets, but I can do it. I need a job. I need to fit myself in somewhere. That is a prescription for disaster, particularly for an older, more experienced candidate.

You want to do the job. And this is back to the Ikigai. This is why the Ikigai is so important. You want to do the job you were born to do. You want to do the job that resonates on all cylinders, if that is even a metaphor that we can make. And people will say to me, oh, well, yeah, that's all well and good. But how do you get that job? I mean, those jobs are one in a million. No, they're not. Because you're not one in a million, right?

You are unique in your own way, but you're not one in a million, right? There are other people out there who are like you. There are other people who resonate with your values, with your experience, with your insights, and all you need to do is connect to those people. So that's why your network and actually building a community within that network is so important because that's how you're going to find those people who are going to resonate with you, who are going to offer you opportunities that

resonate with what you're about. And that's how you eventually achieve that successful transition into a job that's going to be more aligned with who you are, which means you're going to do better. You're going to do better than you've ever done in the past. There will be someone listening who is over 15, who is experiencing ageism, who might be struggling to find the next job, who had a similar

career experiences as you, who is really buying into the idea of, yeah, I want the job I was born to do. I'm with you, John. What now? Well, if I may make a shameless plug, I would encourage them to

Visit my website at the following URL and download those four Ikigai questions in a worksheet to get going on this. And that URL is johntarnoff.com slash four questions, the number four, no space questions, four, Q-U-E-S-T-I-O-N-S. And just start that process rolling. So that's one. The other thing that I would encourage people to do, you don't have to contact me to do this. You can do this on your own today, right after you've listened to this podcast.

is to go to your LinkedIn profile, look at your headline and your about section. Your headline should not be your job title. It should be a collection of three, four, five roles that you perform that are kind of intrinsic to your value proposition. What are the most leveraged things that you do? What is the portfolio of value that you can condense into 220 characters? Because that's what you got.

to get searched, right? So people who are searching for that will find you, but also to represent accurately that value that you want people to know about yourself. Putting senior director of marketing is not going to help you. All it's going to do is get you searched by recruiters who are looking for senior directors of marketing. And that may not be necessarily what you want, right? You're going to go up against

A zillion other senior directors of marketing. You're more than that. You're more than your resume, right? So that's number one. Number two is your about section. So I take a very contrarian view about the about section. So you list all your skills. You kind of have this long list, this dizzyingly long list of skills that you can do, which is wrong because it characterizes you as a generalist.

You are not a generalist at 50 plus. You want to be a specialist at 50 plus. You want to be the single solution to someone's problem. And if you think, oh, no, no, no, that's going to kind of deny me from all these other opportunities. Yes, it will, but it will make all of the opportunities that you are going in on that much more accessible and that much more realistic.

So that's one. But the other thing that's, I think, most important about the about section is that it is not a bio. It is a mission statement. It is a statement of who you are, why you do what you do, and where you want to take it. It is a call to conversation in 2,600 characters that builds a relationship right off the bat with that reader. So in the scroll that they're doing through profile after profile,

You stand out because this is not a corporate speak about section. Seasoned marketing professional with X years of experience managing, you know, coordinated teams. Come on. We've all seen this. Third person, really? You know, did someone else write this for you? Of course not. You wrote it for yourself. So be a person. Be a real person. Share content.

from your heart about why you do it, right? What's been the greatest joy of doing this work? Where did it all come together for you? What was that lightning bulb moment when it all made sense? What are two or three of the most important achievements that you want people to know? Yeah, they're going to be in your experience section, your resume, but, you know, that's just kind of a list of all the stuff you did. What was important to you, right? Where do you feel that you moved the needle? And then, most importantly, where

Where do you want to go? What's the future? The resume is a document of the past, right? It tells them nothing about what you can do for them in the future. That's all they care about, really. The resume is a verification process. What they really want to know is, what are you going to do to help me be profitable next year? So tell them.

what you do. Tell them where you see it. You tell them where your vision is of the business. Be an experienced professional. Be that older person.

They expect more of you because you're older. So be that solution. Be that person. Be that wise, savvy person that they're going to want to come to and go, hey, so tell us, you know, what would you do with this position? And then be prepared to tell them. Is it fair for me to say what you just described is a difference between having a resume and having a personal or professional brand? Absolutely. But I would go further with a professional brand.

in that the professional brand, I think, needs to be based on thought leadership. And to me, thought leadership is this idea that you want to stand up for what you stand for. It is that clear demarcation of the kind of person you are, kind of the way your mind works. And you want to build up this sense of expertise and trust through the consistency of how you show up as a thought leader. Now, all sorts of ways of doing it. People say, oh, I don't want to post on LinkedIn. Okay.

Join a professional organization where you can mentor people, do lunch and learns, create events, be engaged with people in your field to move the needle, to take an issue or set of issues, move them forward. Right. Figure out how you can express all of the value that you have accumulated over the years in such a way that people are going to go, oh, huh.

That guy, that gal, they know their stuff. They've been around. And the more you repeat this and examine this from different angles, engage with others with constructive advice. Never be a scold. Never be a snark. Right? Don't be a troll.

and ignore the trolls who are trying to kind of tear you down. Always be positive and always be giving to that community with referrals, information, meetings, articles, whatever it is that you're going to curate to elevate their understanding. You become this source of professional value. And that to me is the

best encapsulation of the professional brand. You're giving out so many brilliant advice. We should be paying you for this, John. Just to recap, because you've made some really beautiful points. I think people will want is key takeaway. So first of all, accept that ageism exists and pivot your energy towards understanding how you can

add value to an organization. Second, understand what that value is, how it aligns with your values, who you are, the work you want to do, and the practicalities as well in terms of what you need to live the lifestyle you've already got.

get a professional personal brand going and that means brushing up your LinkedIn getting that headline done looking at your buyer I love that we said it's that mission statement as a more experienced professional network absolutely crucial and as part of that networking as you said that outreach as well in terms of contributing to your communities what have I missed what else can people be be doing I

I mean, I think you've got it. You know, the key for me is a mindset shift into certainly a growth mindset where you wake up every day and you go, I have value that I should be proud of. I shouldn't be defensive about it. I should be proud of my age, not ashamed of my age. My age is a good thing. People will come to me and say,

And somewhere in the conversation, it's like, oh, I didn't mean to say you were old. It's like, no, no, no, I am old. It's okay. I like being old.

Uh, I, I, I'm happier actually being older. Uh, I, I know more, I'm more accepting of myself. I'm more curious about the world. I'm about other people. I'm having a great time. So don't apologize for that at all. I look forward and I wish you to have an older period of life as, uh,

amazing as the one that I'm experiencing. Being old is aspirational. It should be aspirational. It should not be a sense of decline and diminishment and shame. The older you get, the less time you got. If you're in denial about that, get out of denial because time goes faster, as you already know, and it's going to go faster from here on out. So make the most of today and

take a risk that you maybe would not have taken yesterday, last week, last year, because the chances of you succeeding by taking that risk are larger, are greater than if you were taking the risk when you were younger. You have more wisdom. You have more experience. You have more sense of how the world works. You have a better sense of who you are. Believe in yourself.

Take the leap. The net will appear. There's a story I like to tell about a guy I worked with a number of years ago who was, he was a really well-educated guy. He was an MBA and an automotive engineer working for a nonprofit consultancy, hated his job. He'd been there for a number of years. And he was going home at night and he was firing up the job boards and he would send me these positions that were

Below him, they were, you know, manager level positions, like director level positions requiring seven to 10 years experience. This is a guy who's been in the business for 20 years. And I used to accuse him of engaging in job board porn because he was acting like he was, you know, looking at porn on websites. And I said, you got to stop doing this because it's not serving you.

And, uh, you need to focus on your value. You need to focus on what you really love to do. It turns out he was a, this was early on. Um, you know, this may be about five, 10 years ago. He was, uh, you know, a renewables guy. He just loved, uh, renewable, uh, vehicles that really at the early part of it, he actually had a, um, an early model of that Fiat electric, uh, the little Fiat electric car, uh,

And I said, so you're like a zero emissions guy. And I kind of gave him a nickname. I said, you're the zero emissions zealot. And he laughed and we had a joke about that. And one day I said to him, why don't you research that domain, see if you can get Z-E zealot and start a blog. And he did. And he started doing more. He started kind of deepening into this whole aspect of his business.

his expertise. And again, Ikigai, you know, what do you love to do? What do you do well? This was really the intersection of that. And he was still looking for a job. He hated the work that he was doing at the company and felt kind of completely ignored. And his manager was kind of a doofus. And so one day he's walking down the hall at the office and the CEO passes by and says, hey, how you doing? What are you working on? And he just kind of

Just jumps into this thing about the zero emissions work that he's been doing and the research, all that, and thinking that this would be really valuable for the company. And he finds himself kind of starting to turn red as he's talking about this thing. I'm embarrassing myself. And the CEO says, oh, that's really interesting. Hey, we have an all hands coming up next week. You want to put together a few slides and share some of this with the company? So he did. Completely changed his work.

And everyone's going, whoa, this is fantastic. Yeah, we should, we should, you should do some more work on this. As a matter of fact, you know, what would you suggest we do? And he said, well, you know, it would be great if we could do that. Great. You should, you should lead that initiative. He was working. So he worked there for another nine months or a year or something like that. And then he got recruited by another company to come do more ZE Zealot work for them.

That turned out to be not as great an experience. And then one of the car manufacturers actually reached out to him and hired him. And he's been there, I think, for like eight or nine years now in this new job doing this work that he loves to do. So to me, that represents a really wonderful shift that covers a bunch of questions where if you start to focus in on your what I love to do, what I do well, right? You focus in on your value proposition.

You're going to build some traction. You can save your job by doing this. But then by saving your job, you can actually also get noticed by other people and be hired for what it is that you love to do and do well. And what benefits do you see the individual receiving?

gain once they've made that transition, once they're then in a job that they were born to do they love? What is an individual experience having made that change? They feel a lot more in control of their career. They have a much more definitive sense of their must-haves and their deal-breakers. And they come across as more authoritative. And they have, once again, pardon my French, they have fewer fucks to give.

Which, strangely enough, I think makes them more attractive. Because if you're one of those people who kind of doesn't care what other people think about you and you're really focused on and able to document and really speak to the value that you deliver...

Well, that's leadership. Is there a point of advice that you'd offer to our listeners to the point where you might go, do you know what? Ignore everything else we've talked about. Just this one thing. Remember this one thing. Stop chasing job openings and start building relationships. If you can say this to yourself every morning, you're going to get off on the right foot. And should our listeners want to build a relationship with you, John, where will they find out more about you? Connect with me on LinkedIn.

I'm the only John Tarnoff on LinkedIn, as far as I know. So it's a very easy search.

And please connect with me. Tell me what your story is. If I can offer any advice, I'm happy to do so. And if you want to obviously go further and talk about an engagement, happy to. Well, that was the incredible John Tanoff sharing his insights on navigating careers after 50. I love what he said about embracing your age rather than hiding it. Being old is aspirational. It should not be a sense of decline and diminishment or shame. Yes.

I think too often we frame aging as something to overcome rather than a valuable asset, I suppose. I think the most powerful thing I've ever heard about aging is that the only thing cooler than aging is not having the opportunity. Oh, oh God, that's dark. Yeah, it's deep. It's deep, man. It's deep, man. Let's talk about another mic drop moment from John where he said, stop chasing job openings and start building relationships. Yeah.

What a line and what absolutely brilliant advice. This does flip the script on how most people approach job hunting, but it is backed by the research. Most of the roles are filled through, out there are filled through existing connections rather than formal applications. It's called the hidden job market and it's estimated about 80% of the roles out there are actually part of the hidden job market. They're not advertised. They're NEPO hires like we heard about on Tuesday. But I think what makes John's approach interesting

really really special is how he grounds everything in finding purpose not just another paycheck and that's something that that I don't think the Gen X's plus have been very famous for previously is having purpose-led work but it's so important especially as he says for that second act

Yeah, if you're Gen X, this is your time. And if you are Gen X, go and listen to Tuesday if you've not listened to before, because we talk all about Gen X. It's been a Gen X week, hasn't it? It really has. I'm pleased because as a Gen Xer, all these bloody Gen Zs are being talked about all the time. And yeah, yeah, I'm pleased it's back to us. Now, if you'd like to find out more about John and his work, you can go and visit his website, which is john.com.

tarnoff.com he's also got and there's links in the free note in the show notes obviously he's also got a free resource for listeners a worksheet covering the four ikigai questions he discussed available at john tarnoff.com four slash four questions and definitely connect with john on linkedin he's the only john tarnoff on there as far as i can see and he's incredibly generous with his advice and as he mentioned he's happy to hear your story and offer guidance

All the links are in the show notes. Well, if you enjoyed this episode, maybe you might want to click that subscribe button. If you're listening on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, just a thought. Or be more like Stuart, who heard us talking about Canada's experience last week in last week's episode. He sent me a great message on LinkedIn last night and is now booked in for a soundcheck this Thursday. There you go. Yeah. And literally in 12 hours, we've changed Stuart's life.

By the way, good luck with the football. You always listen to him on the way to football, so good luck with the football, Stuart. What position does he play? Yes. You can get that goal. Woo!

I was going to say talking of LinkedIn, but it feels like a while ago we were talking about LinkedIn. But anyway, that's where most of our audience will be. Most of the conversations happen between episodes and where I post a lot of the highlights of the podcast. So if you want to go and have a comment or indeed write your own post about an episode or an idea that we should be talking about, tag us, share.

share get in touch send us a bit slide into our DMs we love it when you do that and until you maybe do that and slide into our DMs we'll see you on Tuesday for a regular episode of our weekly news roundup our spicy hot take on our world famous workplace surgery but I'll put your questions to me I think we've run out of breath so have a fabulous weekend we'll see you soon and thanks for listening bye bye bye