Mind Readings: Entry Level Means No Experience

In today's mind meeting, let's talk about jobs. Uh, specifically how companies are approaching uh advertising for jobs. I was helping a friend this past week uh with some job searches on LinkedIn, and my friend is looking for entry-level jobs, you know, admin, content marketing, real strong writer, um, but new, brand new, fresh off of uh actually just uh got out of the armed forces. And we started pulling up all these entry-level jobs, and they all say one to three years experience, must have you know no SEO and content marketing and keyword research. And I'm like, what the heck is wrong with you people?

That's not an entry-level job. An entry-level job literally means you just got out of the army uh and you have uh no work experience whatsoever. Come on, in this is an entry-level job. This is a job that requires no experience, requires no skills, because you're not expected to have any. You should have aptitudes, right?

You should have the ability to uh learn quickly uh and work well with others. Those are aptitudes. But asking somebody uh to have SEO experience for an entry-level job is ridiculous. When were they supposed to get SEO experience if if they've just graduated from college? Colleges certainly don't teach SEO.

Um, and even if they did, I wouldn't trust it because an awful lot of universities, when they teach digital marketing, are teaching stuff from five years ago. Just because somebody says they have SEO experience, it's like, yeah, you have SEO experience from 2015, which is effectively when your college's curriculum uh was built for this topic. So if you are hiring and you have advertised an entry-level job, it means no experience, no proven skills in the workforce, et cetera. Why do companies do this? Well, the uh cynical jerk in me says that it's because companies are cheap and they advertise something as an entry-level job with non-entry level uh skills so that they can pay you an entry-level wage for more senior work.

That might have been fine. Um, well, that might have been something they could get away with a few years ago when you had more people looking for work than there was work. That's not reality today, right? It is early 2022 as I'm recording this video. The job market is upside down.

Companies are starving for talent, and the days of being able to underpay somebody are over, to be quite frank. When you look around at the job market, when you look around at the number of vacancies there are, you've got to raise wages, right? You've got to pay people appropriate to the level that you want them to have to have. Now, starting somebody on minimum wage with minimum skills, meaning none, that's okay, right? Because that's the pay is aligned with the experience.

Somebody with three years of experience is not entry level at all. They are they are mid uh staff level, possibly on the verge, depending on the company, of management. Um, of like being a uh the junior most manager. That's not an entry-level worker, and you're not going to be able to attract talent today that is willing to work for less than they are worth. Because one of the upsides of the great reshuffling, or whatever we're calling it uh nowadays, is that workers have said we want to be paid what we're worth.

I don't disagree, right? As an employee, even though I am a co-owner of the company, but as an employee, I want to be paid what I'm worth. When I uh pitch my services to prospective customers, I want them to pay what I'm worth, not what the minimum amount that they can get away with. But the difference now is that because there is such a lack of available talent, companies are having to step up and say, Yes, we will grudgingly pay um higher wages if we can get you to actually take this job. So if you want to get ahead of the curve, if you want to be able to attract talent and stand a chance of keeping it, you need to substantially revamp your hiring processes and look at what skills you're asking for, look at what how many years of experience you're looking for, and then match your compensation and your job listings for those things.

If you need somebody with three years of experience, call them a mid-level specialist, right? Because that's what they are. If somebody is entry-level, they are fresh off the boat, uh, they have no skills whatsoever, they only have aptitudes, they maybe have some like academic projects they did while they were at university, but that's it. And if you want to pay entry-level wages, you have to get entry-level workers. My other advice for, and this is for career seekers, is because companies are in such dire straits, apply for whatever job you want, right?

Um, within reason. Like if you're one year out of college, you probably should not apply for a CMO job. But if you see a company hiring for the area of specialty or expertise that you have, it's okay to punch up a level or two, right? So if you're a manager, apply for the director position. At worst, they're just gonna say no, right?

Um, but chances are in today's market, they are companies are so starved with talent that they might be willing to take a bet on you. And if you can live up to that bet, if you can uh show them that uh you can do that higher level job at the higher level pay, uh you might be able to advance your career a little faster than you would have, say, three years ago. So, entry level means no experience. If you are a hiring manager and you've got entry level jobs that say they need any kind of skills, please revamp that job title. Thank you very much.