Episode 4 – Unlocking Network Strength

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight: Welcome to The DeBruce Foundation’s Empowering Careers podcast, where we explore strategies and insights for building empowered careers today, we’re thrilled to welcome Nitzan Pelman. She is passionate about unlocking social capital for disadvantaged job seekers and her career journey. Oh, it is proof of that passion. I just can’t wait for you to meet her today and hear about the importance of networks and how we can build them together. Welcome Nitzan.

Nitzan Pelman: Oh Leigh Anne, it’s so great to be here. Thank you so much.

Leigh Anne: Yeah, as I mentioned in the introduction, you have dedicated your entire career to empowering others through skills and connections. Can you tell us a little bit about your own career, and how did you first discover the importance of building a strong network?

Nitzan Pelman: Yeah, sure. Well, I grew up in a pretty religious community in Los Angeles. I grew up as an Orthodox Jew, and when you grew up as an Orthodox Jew, you spend a lot of time with Orthodox Jews. It’s a pretty insular world, mostly because of the way that the rules work. Like you know, if you only eat kosher food and you don’t use electricity on Sabbath and things like that, you kind of end up spending a lot of time with people that do those similar things, especially if they if you go to the same school. So I didn’t, to be perfectly honest, I really didn’t know anybody that wasn’t an Orthodox Jew until I finished college, because I went to Orthodox Jewish College in New York as well, which is a really, yeah, anyway, so I was really struggling with what I was going to do after college and the like sort of shining star of the Jewish community that I grew up with in Los Angeles, was a woman named Stephanie, and she was just like the person who, like, was running all the summer camps for all the kids when she was, like, 14 years old. And, you know, just like this natural, amazingly brilliant leader at like, a really young age. And I remember walking into the library one day in college, and being and seeing her, and she was practicing for an interview to become a Teach for America teacher. And this was in 1999 and no one had ever heard of Teach For America at that point, it was still a very young organization and really nascent. And and she, she said, Oh, I have, I have this mock interview, mock lesson tomorrow for this interview, and I have to teach for five minutes, and so can I, like, do my lesson plan with you? And I was like, yeah, totally. So anyway, she, like, walked me through, like, how memory has been documented over the course of history, running from like Egyptian hieroglyphics to the way we take pictures today. And it was just a brilliant lesson. And I was just like, oh, whatever this woman is focusing her energy on, that’s what I should focus my energy on. And I literally called the executive director of Teach For America cult in New York, and I said, I’m really inspired by my friend Stephanie, and I want to come work at this organization, and for reasons that I will never truly understand, she was that woman. Her name is Cami, she hired me as the first ever development director at Teach for America. I was 22 years old. I was woefully unqualified for that job. I should never have had that title. But when you’re a young organization, title inflation is a part of the way you recruit talent. I guess I was making $32,000 a year, and it was just it brought me into a world that I didn’t know, but very quickly fell deeply in love with. And there’s, you know, an origin story connected to my own educational experience that I can tell you about after this. But essentially, it was the first time for me walking into public schools and low-income communities and just just really like being punched in the gut with like, what does it look like when there are low expectations? What does it look like when people aren’t getting access to high quality educational experience? And I could relate to it deeply, and it just felt like this work of equity and and leveling the playing field like this is going to be my work forever. And it’s been 30 years, or not quite 30 years, but, but 28 you know, since then. And you know, I got to be at Teach for America. I got to work for the Mike Bloomberg, Joel Klein administration during. Sort of this euphoric period in New York of Educational Leadership. I got to design massive initiatives in that period. I went on to be a founding executive director of a nonprofit that was based in Boston called Citizen Schools, and I got to open up their New York operation. Was a way to reimagine the learning day and reimagine what it could look like if kids were using the hours between three and 6pm in like a really productive and really fun and rich learning experience environment. I ran that for six years. I then went to help run a university in Rwanda, just for some, you know, shaking up of sort of the sort of like the New York Life and that I was living. And then I met an investor in Silicon Valley named Paul who asked me to move to California to start a new company that re-enrolled students that had dropped out of college, and I’d been working, yeah, yeah. I’d been working in the K 12 Ed space for a long time, at that point, 16 years. And just kind of like everybody you know, was like, our kids have to go to college. They have to go to college. That was the answer, you know, especially in the early 2000s and so it was like, yeah, like the people that dropped out of college, like, those are my people. They’re just a little older. And so I got to start that company, we re-enrolled lots and lots and lots and 1000s of students back into college. And it was, it was really exciting. But there were also some things that were nagging at me, meaning that if you dropped out of college, and you re-enrolled, and maybe you dropped out again, you had debt, and you had no value for that debt. And that was really disturbing to me. And I just started to think a lot more about, like, what are the shortcuts, what are the ways that maybe we can just help people get jobs instead of, you know, sort of putting all of our stock into the educational institutions. And I’m a huge believer in educational institutions. But I just start to think more about, like, where does the intersection between workforce and job acquisition come from? And I had an opportunity at that point to move over to be an entrepreneur in residence at LinkedIn, and that’s where I really started to become obsessed with relationships. All of my jobs had come through relationships, literally every single one. And LinkedIn had put a referral button on their platform around this time and around 2018 and what they learned by doing that was that the vast majority of job seekers get jobs through referrals. And I, for the first time ever, had really taken stock of what privilege that is to have people that refer you into jobs, that know your that know you well enough or not well enough to think well of you to sort of open up your next door. And that the fact that the vast majority of Americans get jobs that way. Was just it really struck me hard. And then I started to think, okay, like, how many education to career institutions, either in the two year space, the four year space or the workforce development space, how many of them really help to teach the art of relationship building as a centerpiece of how their learners are going to ultimately attain jobs, and it felt like there were very, very few that really focused on this, and that there was a lot of green space in this space. And so I launched a workforce upskilling organization called climb higher that I got to run for the better part of the last six years. And we just we learned so much about what it means to teach people the art of relationship building. How do you answer the ubiquitous first question, tell me about yourself. How do you share airspace in a conversation? What questions do you ask somebody that are open ended or gonna get them to talk? How do you find similarities with somebody in a conversation which is a lubricant for trust? There’s so many places that I think, are not naturally intuitive to our learners, and so we to really build a deep curriculum around that. And more recently, about a year ago, I just realized that there were so many learnings, so many ways, that we could really bring this to a broader set of audiences. If we shared our curriculum, if we shared our work, if we shared our AI social capital. Bot Goldie, with two year colleges, four year colleges and other workforce organizations that we could really see a much more seismic, seismic impact by allowing people to build this relationship set of skills alongside of the in demand skills that they’re working on.

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight: Oh, audience, I know that you are now chomping at the bit, going, what are the things she is going to tell us, because your career journey, what an inspiration. I mean, I can hear in I can hear from you how much you care about serving and caring and supporting others on their career journey. And I’m eternally thankful to Stephanie and Kim right who like got you on this trajectory. But isn’t that the truth? What happens in early parts of our life, how much that puts us on a trajectory, you know, for what then can happen next? And you saying, Hey, listen, every single job I’ve gotten, it came by way of a network, and I have, I. I share a similar experience with you, and sometimes I’m like, why am I doing this? But it’s been through, you know, that network strength, that opportunities have been placed in front of us, and yet so many folks don’t necessarily know what to do or how to build those networks. So as we go into today, I’m so excited for us to get to hear a little bit about that. You know, the the educator in me could not help but to hear and basically have my heart broken just a little bit. As you said, there was some kind of tough experiences in your early education. So then when you started to see this, this other kind of modeling of like, oh my gosh, doesn’t have to be like that. It can be it can be different. And people can hold expectations of individuals who are in education or preparation or, you know, trying to get into the network. Can you tell you said, Oh, I’ll tell you a little bit about that early education experience and how it shaped the way that you serve others. Now, would you, would you share just a little bit about that?

Nitzan Pelman: Yeah, for many years, I didn’t share this story because I was so scared of the judgment that, you know, I feared people would have of me. But, you know, I think, I think probably at this point, my career sort of speaks enough for itself. And so when I was in first grade, I was labeled as a special education student. And what that meant in my life is that people really had a label for me, and it was like a stupid label. You know, it was we were the resource room kids. We were the stupid kids. We were the kids that, like, you know, couldn’t learn. And that label stays, it doesn’t go away, and it stayed with me from first grade all the way until 12th grade. And I just, I have these really painful moments of, like, the new year starting, and like us learning the exact same thing we had learned the year before. Just like the teachers, I don’t think it was their fault, but like, when you think that somebody’s unintelligent, or when you are told, like, these are the kids, you know, the resource room kids, or whatever, you just immediately, like, subconsciously, like, just have a different set of expectations. And to be honest, this is why Teach For America was so such a powerful first early learning place for me, of learning like the studies behind those low expectations and like, just what would happen when teachers were told, like, your kids are this and they weren’t that, like, it was an experiment, and they like their expectations like, just sort of really morphed based on what they perceived the students capabilities to be. And so I graduated from high school without ever having read a book. I had a 700 on my SATs combined. I just was not an academic kid, and I really thought that I couldn’t learn. And you know, I thought school wasn’t for me. I thought that’s where that was the place of humiliation, that was the place of really lowness for me, and all the other places of my life. I shined. I was a natural student leader. I’d always been sort of an articulate person. I’d always like been an organizer of sorts, you know. I was the president, you know, of the or the vice president of my student council in college, and I was, you know, I was on the I was on all the leadership things like, and this was sort of like the secret that only people that were girls, because I only went to separate gendered schools for my whole life, the only the girls that went to school with me knew this label, and nobody else did and and so I Could Obfuscate. I could hide in a lot of ways. I had a boyfriend that had the diametrically opposite educational experiences to my own. He went to the boys school of our, of our, you know, of our, of our high school, and we didn’t, you know, we didn’t have any of the same classes. We didn’t, we weren’t even in the same building or anything like that, and so he didn’t have expectations or labels for me, and he was a lover of learning, a deep lover of learning, insatiably curious. He was writing speeches for the mayor of Los Angeles when he was 15 years old. He was the valedictorian of our class, and he went to Harvard for college. And I started going to Harvard as the girlfriend of a smart kid, and we would spend the weekends debating Kantian ethics and talking about Michelangelo’s art and why Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting for centuries. And I just very I sometimes I would sit in class with him on Fridays. And I just really quickly realized that, like I was a deep lover of learning, and I was a deep lover of knowledge and but that curiosity, that desire, that intrinsic care for for the educational experience of my own life, just was squashed out of me on so many levels. So. And I it was an epiphanous moment, because then I had to reconcile the fact that I didn’t actually have the skills to match this newfound identity that I was starting to grow into, which was the curious, like knowledge seeker, and I had so much catch up work to do. I really didn’t know how to write, and I really didn’t know how to read, and I really had to, like, teach myself all of that in my 20s. And it was hard, it was humiliating. I had future boyfriends after that, or next, subsequent boyfriends who would, literally, I mean, I had a genre and, like, it was, like I did a journalist, these amazing writers, and we would sit at kitchen tables and edit together, you know, and and tears would run down my face as like, they’re like, this is where a period goes. This sentence doesn’t make sense. The syntax is wrong here. This word is incorrect, like, and it would, you know, as a 2527 year old, like, these are just humiliating experiences. And the real reason why kami is such an important person in the world and in my life, was because she chose to overlook those things. She hired me as her development director, and my job was to write proposals to funders, and I could not write proposals to funders, and this was 30 years before chat GDP made life much easier for people who need to write proposals. And like she just decided that my people skills were strong enough that she was gonna let me plan the gala and create friends of Teach for America and run school, drive, supply, you know, campaigns and whatever else I did that was all people driven, and all of a sudden writing emails like that made sense to another human. Were important to me, and like learning in context, learning through experience, like mattered, and I could see why that, why it was so necessary. And so I quickly became, you know, academically mindful and inclined. And you know, I had a really successful career, but the career comes from an arch in a story, or an arc in a story, and that arc is about, you know, where you experience pain, and how you use that pain to fortify yourself, and then what you choose to do to create a different world around you that’s going to look different, so that other people can maximize their human potential in the way that I did mine, but took a very curvaceous curve to get there.

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight: Oh, thank you so much for authentically sharing that and being transparent about that. There are literally listeners who are parents, who are educators, who are just anyone who’s working with anyone of any age, and are hearing you say the importance of someone believing in you, and that’s the relationship piece as well as the relevance piece. You said all of a sudden, it was important to me for to be able to write emails that people could understand. And so relationships and relevance combined with rigor, is really where we have an intersection of a high level of and a high degree of learning, right? And so anyone who’s working with someone who’s trying to learn something, it is about that relationship, that relevance and that rigor. And so thank you for for sharing your story, because it’s such a beautiful connection point of all of those pieces. Now, again, anyone who’s listening now, you guys heard this is her story. But at the beginning, she told us that she’s founded not one but two different companies, and they are already four. She’s at four. She talked about a couple, right? Four. I’m going to ask about a couple today, but there are four that she has founded, climb higher and climb together. I think climb together is your most recent one, right? They’re already they’re having impact, right? So do you have a favorite success story about that from your participants, or do you just want to tell us a little bit about each one of those and what success looks like. Yeah.

Nitzan Pelman: I mean, I sure. I mean, there’s so many beautiful humans in my life that I get to, like, live in their success stories with them, and it’s so joyous for me. I’ll tell you about Alex, who literally just texted me yesterday with this update, and so I feel like it’s fresh in my mind. He was in our first cohort. He had taken 12 years to get a bachelor’s degree. I think he just really struggled with mental health challenges. He had a sort of a stutter, but just so bright and so capable, and he really, like took to our Salesforce administrator certification. He passed that certification relatively quickly. And, you know. We helped him network to a really successful company in Silicon Valley, and he became sort of a data Salesforce guru there, and was there for a few years. He has then gone on to work at Airbnb in their tech department, and you know, like yesterday, he texted me and he said, This person reached out to him because he knew of me and climb higher, and was so, you know, taken by our work, that he reached out to him to recruit him for another job that would, that would be an even higher paying job. And you know, and they had a chat, and that guy now referred him into into that hiring pipeline, and it could be $125,000 job. And, you know, when we met Alex, he was, I think, working at the Amazon warehouse. So, you know, and I wouldn’t say that journeys are linear. Journeys are anything but linear. They’re the opposite of linear. They’re they’re filled with peaks and valleys and and plateaus and and and many, and many, most, many emotions and many highs and lows. And I, you know, I’ve known Alex now for seven years, and there have been lows. There were times where he really self doubted, and he kind of like would put himself into a hole through his self doubt and sort of freak himself out and make him think that he couldn’t, you know, couldn’t succeed, and that sometimes would have an impact on how he was doing in his job, or whether or not he was actually successful in his job. But when he leaned into his skills, his capacity, his and the continued investment in his skills, like he really soared. And we have so many stories like this.

Leigh Anne Taylore Knight: You know, I’m reminded of one of our primary researchers here, Argan, and the conversations that we’ve had in looking at career pathways and individuals journeys that they are circuitous, that it is not like you said it, we somewhere along the line. We’ve been told, or we thought that it was going to be a straight line. But the reality is that is just not the case. And and some of the research that we’ve been able to do here is, you know, is about like, well, what does it take to, you know, be employed with a higher salary, better benefits, better working conditions, more likely to be able to save across your lifetime. And you even mentioned something about what Alex like he was in a space where he got to do things that he likes to do and that he probably does well. Even your story with Cami, she just looked at like, what is it that she does? Really, really well. That’s what we’re going to give her the opportunity to do. And so we’ve done some research around that, and that’s kind of, we call that. And our listeners here will know we talk about that being your career, literacy, understanding your strengths and what you like to do, what you do well, or your Agilities, and then combining this with this strong network, right? And so, it’s really those two things that help individuals project on an employment empowered path. So, in thinking about that strong network piece, is there any research about the impact that it has on someone who’s building their career? If we think about those early career seekers choosing careers, can you talk about the research about them having that building that strong network, or any tips for them?

Nitzan Pelman: Well, yeah, there’s a bunch of there’s a bunch of research on this that I really like feel is very grounding. So, one piece of research that’s very important is Mark Raiders research, and its old research. It’s from 1973 Stanford. He was a researcher there for many years. And what conventional wisdom says is that people who are strong ties, people that you’ve worked with for years, that you know super, super well, those are the people that are going to be your referrers into jobs. And we’ve already know statistically that, like the majority of people get jobs through relationships, through referrals. Then the question is, who? Who are those people who are then unlocking those doors? And I think for so many years, people assumed it’s people who you’ve worked with, like and that you know really, really, really well the camis of our lives or the Stephanies of our lives. And the truth is that Cami and Stephanie are both wonderful referrers as strong ties, but it’s actually people we don’t know nearly as well. Weak ties that actually even open up more doors. And some of this is just about the rule of numbers, or big numbers in particular. So if your network, you know Leanne that I’m not connected to in my network in Berkeley, which you’re not connected to, but now we’re weak ties like that. That means that. That your network is opening up a whole new world that I wouldn’t have naturally had access to. My Network is opening up a whole new world that you wouldn’t have access to and like that. And if you throw many more people into the mix like that, the tentacles of where you can tap into are much, much higher or much larger. And when we just are connected to the people that we have weak strong ties to, let’s say, all of your colleagues who work with you at the foundation, you’re going to know about similar roles, and you’re going to know about similar opportunities, because you’re all kind of overlapping in your world. And so the fact that strong ties and weak ties both make introductions, that was like a real breakthrough in research, and LinkedIn replicated that research and found that to be true on the LinkedIn network in 2018 and so the research is old, but it’s also still very recent, and I think there’s a lot in there. And I oftentimes will ask people, have you ever gotten a job through a relationship. And then my second question is, what kind of relationship was that? Was that person, somebody you knew very well, or was that person somebody you didn’t know that well, but just had a positive impression, a positive rapport, and that was sort of enough to open up a door,

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight: And now and you’re going right into the space of the diversity of that network is key like and what happens in those weaker ties is now you have more variety in the number of industries that are represented in those more variety, probably in the social experiences of those people who are in that more variety, perhaps even in the educational experiences, right? And so that’s exactly the that. That’s exactly what our research is is showing too, is those strong ties and those weak ties. And it is about that diversity of that network, as well as those deep ties that will, that will bolster you across the way too. But those those weak ties, you start to see opportunities in the career marketplace, and others start to see those for you too, that, like you said, you would have your closest network might not even know about those.

Nitzan Pelman: Totally, yeah. And I think so. So the question, of course, then, is like, Okay, so for job seekers and younger people who are really looking for opportunities, you know, there’s a lot of, like, a lot of existential, like, instinct that’s happening right now for young people who are like, oh, like, I hear that AI is making jobs disappear, and there aren’t as many entry level jobs. And, like, empirically, we’re, we are seeing evidence of that starting to emerge. And it’s true that those jobs are, you know, going they’re not completely gone, but they’re harder to get, and they are requiring more experience than we’ve seen. And so I get asked this question a lot, like, if I’m a college student or I’m a job seeker, like, what? What should I be doing? You know, yes, like, the thing that I can say is that you should be reaching out to alumni that are employed in your from your school, from your workforce, organizations from your community, from your neighborhood, and get coffee chats with them. Get a zoom call going, get some way for you to get to know those people. And people love to do this stuff like people love to meet somebody new who’s looking for a career opportunity like, you can ask an alumni of your school and say like, hi, like I noticed that you’re in the cybersecurity industry, and I’m very intrigued by that world, and we both went to this same school together. Would you be willing to tell me a little bit about a day in the life of your job? What do you like about it? What do you not like about it? I mean, when you ask questions, what I used to say to our climate higher learners a lot, is like, you know what? People really love.

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight: They love talking they do, and they love talking about themselves. So, like, that’s right. So those informational interviews I’ve never I, and I’ve coached people this all the way through my lifetime, is like, Don’t worry, they’re not going to turn you down when you say, will you tell me about your career journey? People love to talk about that, and they love then to hear about what you’re interested in, and then think about the other connections that they can make. Right? So it’s not just learning about their journey, but it’s also then, oh, there are three other people who you should probably get to me in my network. I love this. This is so tan, you know? It’s so tangible, it’s so doable, right?

Nitzan Pelman: Yeah? Now, that’s the thing is, like, it’s scary, like, it’s a scary, yeah, not to strangers, you know, but there was just a Wall Street Journal article, like, just a week or two ago about, kind of, like, the power like, I think people think of like a network as like, Oh, I’m gonna, like, walk into a room of hundreds of people and I have to have business cards, and I have to be fake, and I have to shake everyone’s hands, and I have to have a smile that’s plastered on my face. And, like, that’s not what I mean. Like, you do not have to go to rooms with hundreds of people and start randomly, like. Introducing yourself like that is hard. It’s actually hard for me, and I love talking to strangers. That is, like, a hard thing to like do. Thank you for admitting that. Thank you. But like, what you can do is, like, strike up a conversation on the airplane next to the person that you’re sitting next to. And like, I’ve done that dozens of times, and I’m always fascinated by, like, what random things come from that? Or the person at the gym that suddenly, like, has this weird, amazing business contact for you, or, you know, the alumni at your school, or just like, like, networks are everywhere. I mean, I go to, I go to a synagogue, and, you know, the the person who’s the CEO of the largest organization in the country that helps formerly incarcerated people get jobs, like, he goes to my synagogue, and, like, he came over to me and was like, I think we’re in the same world. We don’t know each other. Like, let’s go on a walk together, you know? And like, now, like, he has, like, become a really dear friend. And so like, I just think some of it is about being a little bit bold and talking to people that you might you know, not know, but in smaller spaces, at the gym, at the coffee shop, at the grocery store, at like your kids schools parent night, at wherever. Like, those are, like, smaller places that you can penetrate. And when you build relationships, like doors open. And I’ll say one quick story about this, because I keep thinking about this like my friend Julia Friedland Fisher says, like, you can’t network your way out of poverty. And I agree with that. You need a skill. You need something that you’re talented in and and you need and you need relationships. It’s both, and it’s not one or the other, but under connected. Yes, and and so we, we built this bot. Her name is Goldie, and she is helping you practice how to find people, how to like she helps you get on LinkedIn, helps to write to people with you, and then helps you figure out what you’re going to talk to these people about. And she actually, like, has those conversations with you in a Socratic, like, back and forth sort of way. And anyone wants to test her out, you’re welcome to. I can send the link, the link.

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight: Oh, that’d be great. We’d love to link in the show notes. Yes, absolutely.

Nitzan Pelman: But I and I say that because so we’ve been doing all this user feedback, so we’ve been tripping it out to Western Governors students, Western Governors University students, and I got to do this user interview with a lady who is a mail carrier. She lives somewhere in the state of Washington, and she’s a single mom. She’s a two year old and, like, for whatever reason, like the tech, like, wasn’t working that well on like, one device. And she walked me through the, like, 10 things that she did to try to figure it out so that she could give me feedback. And it was like, I mean, she was like, that I tried this, and then that didn’t work. So that I tried this, and then I researched this, and then I, you know, and it was just so impressive, like this woman was willing to, like, go through a wall just to, like, have a user interview with us, you know. And it was, it was not a high stakes experience. It was, but it taught me so much about her character and so much about who she is. And I would have never met her. I would have never known her, but now that I do, I think about her, and I think about like, when the next person says to me, do you know a young person who like, is just like, will go to go to the end of the world to get stuff done? She might not have, like, all the polished, perfect skills, like, but we hire those people like, we hire people when we are organization and we need just like, some gophers, like some just, like, get at it, young people, like, and like, she’s top of my list. Now, you know, and it’s because I know-

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight: That’s you, that’s you paying it forward, though, right with what happened? I don’t think so. It’s not charity. It’s not Well, that’s true. It’s not charity That’s right, like,

Nitzan Pelman: And when I say to people all the time. It’s like, like, I like the person who was my first EA here at climb together, our new organization. I I had gotten a recommendation for about her. And like, she has, like, literally, single handedly, like, make my life work. Like, this woman is like, to die for. She’s amazing. Her name is Jasmine, and I love her so dearly. And like, it’s not like I hired her because, like, I was trying to help her. I hired her because I needed something, and that person who preferred her into me helped my life. It dramatically. And so, like, this is what I say to people, like, it’s not people don’t have jobs. Like, as charity cases, like, they have jobs because people to do stuff, and the people that introduce them are like, the same that, like, They’re the heroes of the day, as my eight year old would be, like, they saved the day, right? Like, because, like, they just made your life so much easier that you don’t have to sort through 1000 cold resumes. And sorting through 1000 cold resumes is what every job description on the internet. Now has, AI has made it extremely easy to put a resume together, to put a cover letter together, LinkedIn and and indeed, have made it very easy to just click apply, apply. It’s garbage. Like, now, like, AI is going to screen you out as fast as AI got you in. And like, the differentiator is, if you know people, and that’s what like, that’s what.

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight: So I want to, I want to press into that just a little bit, because we’ve got to at least have some listeners out there who are saying, Listen, there is not equal access to strong networks. We do not live in a country where there’s equal access to strong networks. So, what are your thoughts on how individuals and organizations can work to close those gaps that maybe exist in that

Nitzan Pelman: To close the gaps for what?

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight: of having access to strong networks, right? You know? So like the the mail carrier, she is like she is very fortunate that your all’s world’s collided totally. So like, for some of those who like, they’re just their ecosystem does not have, you know, somebody like you have in your church, or you know there’s somebody, there’s some listeners out there going, Well, sounds like she’s got a lot of strong so yeah,

Nitzan Pelman: How do we close those gaps look so some of it is that I think that there’s more proximity than people assume. So I had a learner, I had a climb hire student who worked at a bakery and she really wanted a marketing internship. There’s no way that the CEO of the bakery could ever know that she’s not a mind reader, right, but she learned about the power of weak ties and strong ties from us. And she went to the CEO of her bakery and said, look like, I would really like to be a marketing person one day. And if there’s anybody in your world that you know, like, like, please tell me about them. And she was like, Oh, my husband’s a real estate agent, and he actually could really use a marketing intern. So I’m going to refer you to him. And then, like that, began a new career for her, and she was handing out pastries. So I’m not saying this happens every day. Sometimes it is about joining a network. One of my very like beloved climb hire alum was an Uber driver, and he dropped somebody off at the Salesforce tower in San Francisco. He had never heard of Salesforce before. He got curious. He started Googling, and he found our program on the internet because we taught Salesforce administration. And he’s now had a very long and very successful career as a Salesforce administrator ever since. And it’s because, like, he got curious what I was also saying before about how, like, you know, any open job description now on the internet, or job offer like, or, you know, JD that’s on the internet just gets so many applications, yes, like, and so employers are fatigued by that. They don’t have the capacity to sort through all these things. They might give these resumes a two second glance, right? So how do you cut through that? And we, we put, we put a job opportunity. Actually, almost every single person who works for climb together comes through a network. To be perfectly honest, we very rarely ever post actual formal jobs, because there’s a whole hidden job market that accounts for, like, something upward of, like 60% or 70% of hires, and we don’t even have the actual data on it, because it’s the hidden job market. It’s the jobs that never even get posted, because you know somebody, and they know somebody, and then you get hired for that role. And I that’s how I mostly higher, to be honest. But we didn’t have somebody in our network for this engineering role, and we posted on handshake. And then we got, you know, the like onslaught of applicants. And there was this one guy that went onto our website. He looked at Gold er bot like, because it was published the link on it, and he spent a lot of time sort of analyzing it and figuring out what worked about it and what didn’t work and what ideas he had. And then he went on our website, and he looked for who he thought potentially could be the hiring manager. We’re a small organization, so it was kind of obvious who’s the tech person. And he wrote that guy a long note on LinkedIn, and it was like, Hey, I applied for this role. Here’s like, I what I noticed about the product that you’ve built, and no one else did that. Yes, and guess who got the job? So it’s, it’s it’s not, it’s about networks, but it’s also about what you do to distinguish yourself. The reason why that mail I’ve done hundreds of user interviews, the reason why the mail carrier mom, like is such has created such a penetrative like impression for me, in my mind, and why I think about her all the time is because she did something different. She did something unique. And. In this world of AI, where AI is making it easier for us to do so little like we have to distinguish ourselves. And the distinguishing can come from doing something cold, but it has to look unique and different and like that’s and you can do that by talking to the people you already know, and building from there, you can enroll in your community college and start looking for graduates of your community college or your four year college that are already employed, and you can start writing to them on LinkedIn, and Goldie helps you do that actually, or you can distinguish yourself in a cold job search. But what I can tell you with certainty is that if you’re on a stack of resumes, your chances of getting selected when you’re new and you don’t have a lot of experience are very limited, and so my biggest push to young people today is to find a way to stand out.

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight: Yes, our son actually had the experience of, you know, applying, and was like the least qualified, the least experienced, and he differentiated himself. He wrote personal thank you notes to every single person when he went through the process. He just made sure that he always got their cards and their names, and he kept writing. And, you know, it was a sales job, so guess what was most important to them, not that you know the product, but that you actually follow up, right? And so there are this, this advice of, do something to stand out, do something to differentiate yourself, is critically important, like you said to anyone, anywhere on the job seeker, age continuum, or journey continuum. It has been so much fun to speak with you today. I just as we wrap up, what is just one thing that our listeners can do? You know today like I think it’s about taking action as soon as you possibly can today that would either strengthen their own networks or help others strengthen their networks. What? What is that one thing that they could just start today?

Nitzan Pelman: I can’t I mean not because I’m a former employee of LinkedIn, but because I just like so passionately believe that that platform is so rich with riches for for young people in particular, make sure you have a great LinkedIn profile. There’s a million resources on the internet to help you do that. Make sure you have an updated and attractive looking picture of yourself, because people who have profile pictures are eight times more likely to be noticed. That’s important to that and basically to like find people either that are alumni, or you can join groups on LinkedIn, like the cybersecurity group on LinkedIn has 245,000 people in it. You can join a group like that. You can research like where people live, where their you know what their areas of domain expertise are, and you can write them thoughtful notes, but you have to write them thoughtfully. I get a lot of garbage notes on LinkedIn, and garbage notes are like, hi, Nitzan. I noticed that we have similar connections. It would be great for us to connect. I can’t even begin to tell you what a waste of time sending a note like that is. Leanne, you and I didn’t know each other before today, but you sent me a beautiful note on LinkedIn. And like, you know, it was like, meet I can’t wait to meet you. And I’ve done all this research. And you know, like, it’s when you show somebody that you care and that you’re paying attention. And I’m not saying go do this for 100 people, although you could do it for 100 people too, but if you do it for three like, and they are really thoughtful notes, I noticed that you worked here, and I noticed that then you went here, and I noticed that you did this, and I’m so interested in this career trajectory that you have, like, Would you be willing to have a zoom chat with me so I could learn about you? Like, people love that, and you can build networks that way. Yeah.

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight: Thank you so much. That reminds me of a saying, you know, no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. And we’re right back to the top of the hour in the conversation with you, where you talked about how important it was to serve other individuals, and that you’ve built climb higher and climb together in that space of how to care. And thank you so much for today, just helping us be reminded of the importance of the relationship, the relevance and the rigor when someone is learning something, the importance of basically spending your social capital on others to help them along the way, which ends up to not be about helping them. No, it’s like actually building a bridge from the individual to the industry that needs their skill. And that there is that value proposition, that value that someone brings into. To the career marketplace, believing in others, taking that first step, not being afraid to actually ask someone to learn about their own career trajectory. Thank you so much. You have been inspiring. Today. I just cheer you on. We all cheer you on with climb together. I cannot wait to see what will come of that. We’re so appreciative of your joining us today. I have been so inspired about your passion for helping people build empowered careers. So, can you give us a call to action today?

Nitzan Pelman: Yeah, absolutely. So, for those of you who are part of educational to career institutions, it could be high schools, it could be two-year colleges, four-year colleges, or it could be fellow workforce, organization, upskilling entities. What we believe passionately is that everyone needs to be building relationships, and what we’ve learned over the last six years is that it’s hard for young people to know exactly what that means. You know, our young generation grew up with covid. They grew up with phones being put in their hands when they were little people. And like the art of relationship building is truly becoming a lost art. And so, we have really been working with two-year colleges, four-year colleges and other workforce training organizations to build our learning, our lesson plans, our content, our activities for relationship building into curriculum. And we also have a social capital bot that we talked about, Goldie, and we can also work with institutions to essentially have people assign Goldie for homework or for other activities so that the learners can pace themselves. And ultimately, Goldie will help people get onto LinkedIn, write to people, write those notes, all the things that I was saying young people could do. Goldie helps you to do those things. And so, if you want access to Goldie, or you want your institution to have access to Goldie, we’re a non-for-profit organization. We’re not here trying to make money off it. Money off anybody. There’s a small cost, but it’s not a high it’s not a big cost. And we’d love to partner with anyone who’s interested.

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight: Oh, thank you so much for your generosity in sharing this. And for many of you who are our listeners, you are out there in exactly those kinds of institutions, and many of you are already using the tools that are provided by the charitable mission of The DeBruce foundation to build career literacy. So, this is the perfect pairing this career literacy with building these networks. That is what’s going to put people on empowered careers pathways. And thank you for that work that you all do every day. And thank you so much for offering this as an opportunity to our audience and to others around the around the around the US. So, let’s get out there. Let’s spread the word. Let’s go do this. And for everyone who tuned in, if you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to check out our website @ DeBruce.org, and follow the DeBruce foundation on social media for more career building resources. Take the advice today. Kick up your LinkedIn profile and make sure that you expand your network, build your network, strengthen your network, so that you will be empowered. Because together, we can build empowered careers. We’ll see you next time.