Today’s job search is considerably different from the busy, fast-paced job hunts of the past. Nowadays, it goes beyond having the ideal CV or applying as soon as possible. Finding a career that aligns with your values, demonstrating your abilities, and establishing genuine relationships are now important. In light of significant shifts like remote work and new hiring practices, how are you preparing to thrive?
In this episode, I chat with Wyatt Carr, a partner at The Page Group and a seasoned recruiter. Wyatt talks about the struggles of finding a job and hiring the right people in today’s fast-changing world. We discuss simple ways to stand out when job hunting, how automation is changing the workplace, and what businesses are doing differently when hiring. Tune in now!
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Navigating the Job Search in a Changing World of Work with Wyatt Carr
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a topic, something that I find one of the most frustrating aspects of the world we’re in today, and that is the process of finding a job or the process of connecting people with jobs. I know a lot of people and I also personally have been in situations where it just seems to just take a long time to find a job and there’s all these things about getting noticed, getting your resume out there, when all it is that you really want is to just find a job that fits what you studied in school, what your background is, what you think you’d be good at and also be interested in, do a good job at it. The process does not seem to be that much better, per se, from the employer side too because they’re just looking for talent and I know that there’s mismatches all around. So, to talk about where we are in the process of job finding, talent acquisition, all that, I would like to introduce my guest today, Wyatt Carr, who is a partner with The Page Group and an experienced recruiter.
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Wyatt, welcome to the program.
Thank you so much, Stephen. Happy to be here.
Happy to have you. I just see the frustration so many people express to me, whether it be in person or even over LinkedIn, about people really looking for jobs. If anyone out there listening is in that situation where they’re looking for a job, they just need to find something, what do you think people need to be doing?
So I think the number one thing to understand when you’re looking for a job is to realize that you are an investment if someone offers you a job. They expect to make more money than you cost to employ and that’s the current challenge with the current market is companies are seeming to do more with less and that is a huge concern about AI and how it will impact the workforce and how it will target or potentially take opportunity from a lot of white collar professions. Everyone thought automation would come for blue collar and it’s come to white collar, everyone’s probably heard that already.
You need to understand what value you bring to a business and then find the businesses that need your services, find the businesses that would value from what you can bring to the table. Share on XI think we were very spoiled the last 10 years, literally, in my career, I’ve been in staffing and talent management, the economy has just continued to boom. I think during COVID, white collar workers did better. Blue collar and essential workers, they absolutely were devastated. So much money shifted to the laptop class and the billionaire class. Corporations weren’t hurt. Very few corporations were hurt from the pandemic. The small person was, the blue collar worker, the essential worker, and a lot of people did lose their jobs, but it was somewhat short lived on the white collar side, the skilled labor, laptop class, they call it or college degree educated class, and for the last 10 years with that exception where some people were impacted by COVID but most weren’t, it’s been an incredibly positive market and it’s been a candidates market, and you can kind of choose the opportunity, lots of opportunities coming to you, companies are hiring like crazy, and a lot of that was due to government policies. Well, you could talk a lot about all these things, about funding, inflation, and government just printing money, and so that obviously stimulates kind of a fake positive boom, but I think when you’re looking at what type of opportunity you want, you have to be able to see from the manager’s perspective on why they would want you, and I think people do need to reexamine their expectations about the opportunities that they might be a fit for or might be the best fit for because there’s a lot of competition right now, and there’s small businesses that have never worked with someone as skilled as you in your specific skill set that you can probably bring a lot of value to but you’re going to make a lot of less. Startups, where you could jump into a more broad role, but you’re probably going to make a lot less, and so I think people’s expectations are at what the market has provided the last four or five years, but that needs to change, and I’m feeling it as much as you. I’m trying to place people with companies that don’t want to hire people. The staffing market is, I think, contracted last year for the first time in a long time. Think it remained flat or maybe it was 1 or 2 percent growth in 2020 and then it had a huge resurgence in ’21 and ‘22 and ’23, continued to grow and I think ’24, almost every staffing company took a cut back and that doesn’t really happen. Staffing was fairly insulated from the dot-com crash, it’s been fairly insulated from the ’08 crash. It was fairly insulated from COVID. It’s kind of been a recession proof industry but it’s struggling right now.
You’re selling your ability to make this company more money than you cost and kind of shift the mindset to not where a company would be lucky to have you but it’s an employer market. It’s something that we have to just come to terms with.
So you’re saying that anyone out there that’s looking for a job needs to start from this approach where you’re saying, “What am I valuing the company?” because I think a lot of us kind of grow with this idea that, okay, you go to college, you get this degree, and this degree gives you the qualifications for the job, and so now, all of a sudden, it’s almost like maybe requiring a different way of thinking because if someone got a degree in a certain field that’s, say, not related to marketing or sales or anything like that, you don’t really learn anything about sales, you don’t really learn anything about selling yourself, you’re just like, “Okay, I have this specialty skill set,” whether it be kind of going back to the, I guess, pre-information days when people would kind of learn a trade or even people in the trades now, okay, you’re a plumber, you don’t really need to sell you have this plumbing license and people are going to find people with that license or that certification the same way if you’re, say, a coder, front end developer, say, then think, okay, have this, you’re not really necessarily thinking how am I giving this company value, you’re just thinking, I know these skills, I can code in these languages, I can build these types of things. So, are you saying the first thing someone needs to do now is to change that mindset away from, “These are my qualifications, this is why I should be here,” and more and just thinking directly about, “Okay, what kind of companies am I really going to provide value in and how am I going to communicate that value?”
Again, this is my personal opinion. Yes, I think so. I think we are unfortunately competing with the world in the United States, every single country competes for United States business, and there’s so much outsourcing, there’s so much competitive environments in every single industry. So, the blue collar work, which was supposed to be the one that got automated, seems to be the safest. Thinking about yourself as a salesperson for your skills is a tough pill to swallow but if you don’t, you’re just going to be frustrated with how things are. You see posts on LinkedIn all the time, nine months, ten months out of work, 300 applications, only two callbacks, and that’s very tough to see. Nobody wants to see that, nobody wants to be in that situation. But if you look into how sales processes are structured, there’s often a very structured approach to approaching a customer and it starts the word –– typically use a sequence where you have an email and then you have a call, then you have an email, and then you have a call, and then you have a call, and then you have a LinkedIn message, and then you have a short video then you call during these certain business hours and so it’s a very structured approach in sales, it’s not just banging the phones all day and just hoping someone answers and then off to the races, hope you do as good as you can. Aspects of that are true, the Glengarry Glen Ross-type environments, but for the most part, it’s based on repetition and relationships. And I think finding a job would be the same thing. First, people need to know you’re looking for a job. You should have agents out there basically looking for a job for you, and those are your closest connections. And you should have a community of people that are also looking for a job and you’re growing together, you’re learning things together, you’re learning lessons from each other so you don’t have to make the same mistakes. I just did a short seminar with a group of six individuals, all different skill sets but all looking for work, and they’re basically are going at it together. And I think having a tribe –– sales is very lonely. If you have been in a sales role, I’m sure you’ve seen that, and if you’re looking for a job, you’re in a sales role. I think that mindset is useful. And the way you make sales easier is you have people doing it alongside you, in the trenches with you. And, yeah, I think mindset shift does need to happen of I’m deserving of a job, go to college, you get a job. Some people are saying that’s a big lie. You have to have skills. It’s not just knowledge of things. You have to have skills and you have to have skills that are better than the market, better than what they can find elsewhere, and so if you’re competing with developers in India and Belarus and Ukraine and Africa, what can you do that they can’t and you have to sell that and have a sequence and have a target list, and there’s just a lot of extra effort you can put in to adjust with the times, I think. That’s our main strength as humanity is our adaptability. We can adapt to every single climate in the country or the world. There’s no other species that can do that. It continues to be a skill of ours in the modern world and modern economy. You have to adapt. People that don’t adapt get left behind. There’s so many AI tools out there. If you’ve only heard of ChatGPT, you need to do more research. You need to learn about Perplexity, you need to learn about Claude, you need to learn about Anthropic, you need to learn about Grok, you need to learn about Llama, and then you want to talk about what you did with these things relative to what your skill set is. What can these things accomplish? What are other people in your skill set using these tools to accomplish? How did you learn how to do that? You have a conversation with a business owner or a manager or a director, whoever is potentially hiring you, and you propose an idea for them, they’re like, “Wow, that’s a great idea,” you are a strong prospect for that job, if you propose something that is something they haven’t thought of, and that just comes from doing your research and learning. I think as soon as you stop learning in the tech industry at least, you’re done, you’re dead in the water. And I think that is probably the case for most industries, I can just speak for the tech industry. Yeah, I think a big mindset shift, much more effort to find jobs right now, and you can’t just assume it’ll happen. You have to really take it seriously, have a process and stick to it.
Now, you also said that the recruiting industry had a flat-ish, maybe even slightly negative year for the first time in what seemed like a long time since you went all the way back to dot-com which is pretty much the turn of the century. What do you think is the reason for that? Is it because of different types of jobs related to some of the disconnect that we’re seeing between crowded for all these white collar jobs, blue collar jobs, which tend to, I guess, not use head hunting services as much as just kind of yellow pages and search engines, being kind of the ones that people need more now or are there other factors technologically contributing to that?
My guess might be slightly better than most, but I want to put a disclaimer there too, there probably are people with more education on the matter, but there’s a lot of weight in the top 100 companies. The 10 largest companies are like 40 percent of the S&P right now, which is 500 companies. So there’s a huge, huge amount of weight just to a few companies. And those companies were run with a wild culture of people parading around about the cafeterias and the nice lounges. These companies of CEOs are like, “We can do a lot with a lot less people.” I think when Elon cut Twitter from 9,000 to 2,000 and the product is working better than ever and they’re adding features every single month, companies were like, “We can probably return more to our shareholders than we are now, and we’re just overstaffed.” And so I think a lot of companies just were overstaffed. I think management, the way to pat yourself on the back in management or in any corporate structure is to have people reporting to you, and you want to open up a position for everything. That’s how government is too. Everyone wants hierarchy and so you just hire for everything and it’s all good, you don’t have to think about the money. And then, eventually, that comes around, and someone has to think about the money. And so that with the technology advancement of AI tools and what it can accomplish, there’s an AI agent out there at a company that I’m supporting in Boulder that is an entire business intelligence team and it can access all your company’s data and provide insights and provide recommendations and time sensitive reminders and it’s a whole team and it’s one tool, and they’re just getting started, I don’t think they’re a massive company yet, but those things are going to be more common than ever and companies are projecting that, they’re looking into what tools they can buy at the cost of much less than an entire department. It is scary. Yeah, so I think technology definitely is playing a role, but also companies just were gluttonous for too long. It’s a multifaceted problem from years of human decisions, I think. It’s just very human aspect of over hiring and wanting to spend for the sake of spend and having to do more with more and not hoping to do more with less.
Well. I mean, we’re all familiar with bubbles, and just periods of time where things are not exactly sustainable or not exactly natural for some amount of period of time that oftentimes last like a couple years to a couple of decades, a time where people’s first instinct about everything was to hire someone as opposed to more holistically think of all the different ways that they can get a certain thing done. And now people are being more scrutinous. Now, with that combined with, say, some of these other efficiency projects going on, as well as the AI and all these technologies, do you see this in the long run changing anything about the way we work? Is there going to be enough work even for humans to be done, for us to, say, keep a 40-hour work week or keep our job structures similar to what we’ve known?
I don’t think there’s precedent to say otherwise, but I also think technologists and AI ethicists would argue that this is unlike any technological advancement that we’ve ever seen. So, typically, technological advancement provides more opportunity. The cars kind of didn’t impact the horse and buggy industry so well, but ––
But it was a new industry.
–– a lot more opportunity for everybody, and you can say the same thing about electricity and whale blubber.
Yeah, exactly.
Save the whales. And so there’s probably a lot of people that will argue it’s going to change forever. People are going to be strapped to find a corporate job because anything done on a computer seems likely that it can be done by a computer for now. Now, we have humanoid robots, where a lot of those manufacturing roles or warehouse jobs are going to be done by robots. And so it is a little scary. I think it’s natural for people to be a little scared, but I can’t focus on that. I’m going to focus on what I think I can bring value to companies now and do everything you can to stay valuable to companies and stay valuable as an employee or as an entrepreneur. I think what you will see is a lot of solopreneurs, a lot of very small companies emerging, much more entrepreneurship, because a plumber is never going to be interested in being a marketer but they need a marketer and so you’re going to have a lot of people that can be very effective as a one-person, two-person team, and so I think more competition is going to arise in the entrepreneurial space because companies aren’t hiring as much but the opportunity for competition is still there.
And so business is based on relationships. Obviously I can’t predict the future. I see this like anything in recruiting is so easy to see how an all intelligent AI would be able to solve so many of the problems we have with recruiting and solve so many of the tasks basically in recruiting. I think it’s not impossible to imagine Microsoft reformatting LinkedIn to be this all-knowing AI machine where it matches people to opportunities that they would never find otherwise and maybe it’s not through LinkedIn, maybe it’s through a completely separate tool that uses LinkedIn and scrapes LinkedIn, but giant JARVIS-type creature or bot that could tell you what companies you’d be most valuable at and the company would have their membership as well where they can find the people that would be best fit for them based on their track record and the AI will just have such a good ability to analyze the person’s experience and their success and then you have the same thing with the company side. Maybe it’ll provide more opportunity. Maybe there is a positive out there for more opportunity provided to people, because I think there’s the same amount of unemployment or less than job postings, so there typically are more jobs than people to fill them and I don’t think that’s changed, I think there are a lot less job postings out there but I do imagine there will be a lot of positives to come from this too and I refuse to be a black pilled individual. I believe the future is bright and things will change but things have always changed, so, hopefully, the people making those big decisions are looking out for humanity and I think most of them are. I feel good about that.
I mean, it’s better to be hopeful about that than to not be. I was thinking about how like 200 years ago, this day, we were kind of in like the peak phase of this like Luddite movement that kind of propped up as a result of the industrial revolution or the first industrial revolution. And 200 years ago, the people at that point in time would have never been able to imagine an automobile industry. It just wasn’t yet in our Imagination. I think some people may have heard of these trains that were about to start coming up in 10, 20 years, but there’s always going to be something that we can’t imagine, and even something that us here in 2025 are not going to be imagining popping up, say, 50, 100 years in the future. It’s just a matter of what that future is. Now, has this also been a frustrating time period from the employer standpoint? Because I think I’ve read some of the articles talking about certain generational groups and certain other groups of people being hard to recruit, being hard to find, and even being hard to keep employees with certain other expectations. What is the employer experience with the current climate right now?
That’s a great question and it’s really hard to answer without some pretty broad generalizations, which is probably going to offend somebody in some generation.
Yeah, yeah.
If I can describe my generation and the people that I’ve grown up around and the people that I’ve spent time with in my age group, I would say that very few people my age know the concept of hard work and the ones that do rise up very quickly. If you were taught how to work by your mother or father or you had some sort of example of work ethic, you are light years ahead of the competition. Very few people go the extra mile. Most people do the bare minimum and very few people that work hard are not very good at what they do. And so if you work hard at something, the promise of this country is that you can make it, that you will make it. And so I think that promise comes true to most. I think people are struggling right now, but there is going to be differences. I think people are addicted to their phones and social media and so the attention span is much less and I think they’re probably going to be impacted on a case by case basis. I think younger people are probably spending more time on their phone, 7, 8, 9 hours a day. I’ve worked with an employee before and time in the day and I looked at our phone report, how many hours she spends on her phone ––
Oh, yeah, that screen time.
I’m like you have more time.
Yeah, that number.
One hour, that’s excellent. That’s not bad at all. One hour average, wow.
I mean, my business is around cutting screen time, so I should be lower than most people but I also share that belief that people have those hours, if you just like kind of get rid of your TikTok app or whatever it is that’s really hooking you in.
Yeah. There’s so much out there to grab our attention. I think this is a part of the evolution of technology too is companies just finding every single way to grab our time and grab our attention. I think, eventually, they’ll realize that that’s not the best model and that’s actually not what we should do. We should not hack the minds of every individual on Earth and addict them to something that doesn’t actually help. And so I think we’re the unfortunate recipients of this initial wave of addiction technology. I’m hopeful that’ll change. I’m hopeful it’ll eventually become somewhat valuable, because we are just chemistry to some extent. I think the debate on the soul and everything, of course, but they hacked the mind. Dr. Robert Lustig writes a book, The Hacking of the American Mind, I believe, but it’s not just the American mind, it’s literally everyone ––
Yeah, all over the world.
In Iraq and Afghanistan trading shit coins with ––
Yeah.
Everyone’s trying to make money on this casino, this worldwide casino, and it’s like that’s probably not the best utilization of technology. But I think, generationally, kids are quick to learn technology and so set up avenues to learn and you find people that want to learn, I think you’re going to be in a good position as an employer. I think employers are reconsidering how much they expect from employees, what they want to achieve with people, what they can achieve with tools, because business is about making money and if you can make more profit at the cost of less people, most business owners are going to choose the former. You want to make more profit, that’s what business is. So, again, I think that alludes back to I could see more entrepreneurship happening, but, yeah, I don’t want to drag any generation, because I think, if anything, people over 35 have it extremely difficult because there’s an immediate bias when you see a long career on a resume and you’re applying to a job, it’s like why don’t you have a job, and there’s just so much ageism in the job market and it’s talked about a little but nothing close to other -isms, and it’s by far had the biggest impact in hiring decisions that I’ve ever seen.
There’s so much more impact from ageism than there is any other -ism in the hiring market and that’s been the case in almost every customer I’ve ever worked with. Share on XThey know exactly what they want and it needs to be this specific bucket of years of experience and very unlikely to choose anyone with experience more than they are asking for as much as less than what they’re asking for. Employers have an impression that people are set in their ways and, from their experience, that might be the case. I’m not here to say that’s not the right decision for their business but I also wouldn’t say it is the right decision for their business. It’s kind of illegal to say that.
Well, what’s weird is one of those things that’s like correlative but not descriptive of every person, because the older someone gets, the more likely they are to be set in their ways, but I’ve met plenty of people who are into their 60s and not set in their ways and I’ve also encountered in the past teenagers that are quite set in their ways and everything in between. But, obviously, it’s an easier way to evaluate people than to look into every person and try to get to know them a bit.
Yeah, that’s a frustration with current employers as well. With job postings, you have 300, 400, 500 applicants, there’s no way to talk to all those people and so you filter by keywords and people fit their resumes and then you have a bunch of people that are not a fit at all because it’s so easy to apply, if someone came into your office 30 years ago and dropped a resume and say, “Hey, I’d like a job,” you’re pretty likely to talk to that person, but, now, it’s just a click and there’s hundreds and it’s just really difficult to find the right person and they’re very specific about what they want. They have very specific standards and they want applicants that have everything they’re looking for. And so aspirational jobs right now are not really worth applying to in a lot of cases. It’s probably not worth your time to apply to something that you think you would be good at but they’re going to pick someone that has done that before and it’s kind of depressing but I think that you do what you want with your time but I don’t believe you’re going to see a positive investment from that. And I would love to hear success stories otherwise.
At The Page Group, what is your specific method that you take as far as connecting the right employer with the right candidate?
The most important thing in recruiting is to know what you’re looking for. You really need to know what you’re hunting for. Share on X
They call it head hunting, and hunting, it’s a pretty good analogy. If you go out to find a buck and you shoot a doe, you’re going to get in trouble. You have to know exactly what you’re looking for, otherwise, you go on this wild goose chase and you end up wasting everybody’s time. And so that’s the number one thing that I think recruiters and staffing people have a disconnect on is because most staffing customer relationships are handled by an account manager, a person that is a salesperson, and then they ship that off to their recruiter to go find that person based on their description of what the customer wants. And so the recruiter never actually talks to the person that’s hiring and the account manager is a salesperson, very rarely are they technical, and recruiters aren’t especially technical either but they spend more time with the technical people than the salesperson does and so, most of the time, the recruiter is more technical than the salesperson. So just understanding what you’re looking for is often a large gap there. And so something that I’m able to offer now but potentially might not be able to in the future, we’ll see, is when I’m talking to a customer or employer or a hiring manager, I’m the one looking for the person for them so I know exactly what they’re looking for based on our conversation. You ask very smart questions, deep questions, understand there’s a strategy in staffing to find –– culture fit is more important than a technical fit and I think that’s nonsense. I think we definitely need a technical fit, but culture does make a big difference. If you have a very ambitious, aggressive culture, you need to find someone that’s ambitious and aggressive. And if you have a fairly relaxed, positive, cohesive, supportive culture, you need to find someone that fits in that and they don’t go back and forth, like the ambitious, aggressive person would not work well in the other, so that’s a piece where you’re just understanding people, talking to people every single day, understanding what their tics are, what they like to do, what’s their best at, what types of environments they excel in, and then understanding the most complex problem they’ve ever solved, it’s the Elon question for interviews, tell me about the most complex problem you’ve ever solved and how you solved it, and that’s ability to understand how someone’s taken on challenge, how complicated that challenge was, and how they rose from it. And then you can tell that story to the manager. So I think The Page Group excels in being the best at what we do. We’ve been in the industry for a long time. We always were the best in our teams, and it was time to do it ourselves. You don’t want to work for a private equity firm anymore and you’d like to try to do it on your own. So building connections is extremely difficult, proving to a company that you’re worth taking the time to spend, the staffing guys are a dime a dozen to some extent, and so proving your worth is difficult in the beginning, but once we have these client relationships, we’ve done extremely well and people really do enjoy working with us.
And so what gave you the belief in yourself or the belief in your group to go out on your own as opposed to just continuing to work for the private equity firm?
Yeah, I wasn’t brave enough to go out on my own. I did join a partner that I’ve worked with for almost eight years and he was a partner or a co-worker of mine at two prior companies. He hired me at my last company and he’s always stood by me, he’s always provided the best for me, and I just have a lot of trust in him. I’ve always enjoyed working with him, and so I wasn’t going at it alone. I think going at something alone is very difficult. You need to have a really strong plan put together on how you’re going to have a community, how you’re going to have a support group, how you’re going to have mentorship. There’s so many gaps that you need to fill when you’re on your own. And even with one partner, you still feel that. We’re working remotely and I’m thinking about coworking spaces, I’m thinking about joining more networking groups, I’m in three already, Denver Young Entrepreneurs, Colorado Startups, The All In Podcast Meetup group, I’ve got alumni association from Cal Poly, so I think having the infrastructure in place to make sure you have contacts, make sure you have support. I had financial strength based on fiscal responsibility. I don’t spend all the money I make so I have the ability to take a risk, and if it didn’t go well, I’m not going to be on the street. I have a runway and the stock market continues to do well so if it starts to crash, I’m going to be in a little bit of stress, a little bit of trouble, but I also believe in my ability to go out and get a job as a bartender, as a trade apprentice, worst case scenario, I trust in myself to figure it out.
That you’ll figure it out.
I’m confident that we can build a best in class staffing company. I’m very confident of that. Ready to face the consequences of that failure. I think failure is not an option, mindset wise, but failure is often a great teacher and you learn a lot. So I am scared, I’m worried about that, but that’s not what I focus my energy and time on.
And this reminds me of a piece of advice that I give some people about there’s some things that are always good to do, whether it be taking care of your physical health, being responsible and intentional with your spending, not wasting money, or just spending it lavishly on stuff that’s not really going to bring you any happiness and/or learning advancement as well as building good connections and making good impressions on people, building that social capital that some people call, and sometimes, regardless of where you are, even if you’re not in a place where I’m worried I’m going to lose my job or I’m worried about my business getting going, it’s always good to be doing those things at all the time anyway because you never know when something like that’s going to happen or you never know when a whole new idea is going to come your way and you’re going to suddenly be like, “Whoa. This is something that’ll be really cool to do.”
Yeah, there’s so many extremely basic financial lessons and tips that every person should know, but a lot of people don’t and it’s really sad, people spend money they don’t have that’s not out of necessity. If you need to eat, then putting on credit is probably acceptable, but putting a video game system or a TV or something else on credit is just –– you can’t do that. That’s like you’re setting yourself up for failure, and so don’t rob tomorrow with today. So many people make that trade off and just push it to tomorrow and that’s just a scary way to live and you’re not ready for things to go wrong, and things do go wrong, so six months of expenses you want to have saved up, and until you have that, you shouldn’t be eating out. You shouldn’t be spending on luxuries. You should have certain things set up and very basic financial tips that most people weren’t taught and all the self-education resources are out there so I don’t think any of your podcast listeners wouldn’t know these things already.
Yeah, I know. I hope most people, especially if you listen to a good number of episodes of whether it be this one or anything else, it’s a basic idea that, at one level, you can look and say, okay, I pull in, let’s say $3,000 a month, and then I spend $1,500 on rent, that doesn’t mean you have $1,500 other dollars to spend on everything else that you quite want. There’s going to be things –– last summer, I had to drop $6,000 on a new door and $5,000 on tuckpointing for the house and that’s just these expenses that come up in addition to just the fact that if you save money, you can invest it and invest it in dividend yielding stocks or stuff that’s going to produce growth and actually get you in a much more firm situation, and it sounds like a lot of this, when it comes to anything that’s a potentially scary endeavor, is about having built a foundation, and that foundation includes, of course, your physical health, how you feel about yourself, even your spiritual and emotional health, as well as just having enough to feel secure with your financial resources as well as having the right people in your life and having the right people to potentially support you or even give advice like, “Okay, I just wrote a business plan for 2025, can I share it with you and get your feedback?” or something like that.
I couldn’t agree more there. I think people really underestimate how much other people enjoy helping, you or anyone. You get so much gratification from helping people. It’s a selfish endeavor. Everyone thinks of helping others and volunteering as this amazing Godsend, but you’re the one that benefits, the person volunteering, the person helping, and so anytime someone ever asks me for assistance with something, my answer is almost always yes, if you can find time on the calendar, but you have to kind of assume that most people around you would feel the same way. If you have a connection on LinkedIn you’ve never talked to and they happen to be in a position that you’re interested in talking about, that might be a longer shot but someone in your near network, someone that you’ve worked with before, it’s safe to ask. You really can’t lose. Don’t worry about a no, that’s another thing that salespeople have to get good at is just hearing no. I think a lot of people are very scared of that no but if you remove that fear, you can get so much more done. And people want to help you, mentoring others. You just want to make sure you have that network. And if you don’t work on it, go to the user groups, find your person, find your crew, find your tribe, and it’s out there. It’s never been easier to find it. It feels hard but it’s never been easier to find it.
Oh, for sure. I mean, even here in Denver, I mean, I think the first time we talked, you mentioned the four networking groups that you go to a lot and I mentioned the four networking groups that I go to a lot and they’re all just kind of out there for you to kind of go and check it out.
Yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard to walk into a networking group and know no one and you just have to walk up to someone, but you have to realize that they’re all in the same exact place that you are, and everyone’s putting themselves out there. And so it’s a community of people all going through the same thing and you just have to have the courage to do it.
And have you read or heard the story about the rejection guy? I don’t remember his name and I apologize for forgetting his name every time I bring this up but I think this was like four or five years ago, this guy set out to do like 100 days of rejection, and he came out with like 100 ridiculous things, like even like going up on the street and asking a random stranger to buy him dinner, stuff that he expected at least 50 percent chance that the person is going to say no to, just to get him mentally conditioned to be kind of used to and accept rejection and hearing the word no.
I love that. I haven’t seen that. I’ll look into that. That’s hilarious.
It’s crazy because we don’t get used to it, and especially education system, the worst thing you can do is try to do something and fail.
It does get easier. It doesn’t get enjoyable. You don’t ever like it. It’s always not fun to deal with, but you kind of just have to, water off a duck’s back mentality, it’s like, okay, on to the next, on to the next. The average sale happens on the 8th or 12th contact, 8 to 12 contacts, and so 1 to 7 is going to be a no answer, a no, and then, hopefully, eventually you’ll get there. And so that’s a wild stat that I’ve always kept with me and I don’t even know where I got it from, but the average sale happens on the 8th to 12th contact. It’s just so wild to think about, because I don’t really usually reach out to people 8 or 12 times.
No. I mean, you have this idea, I’m like I’m bothering them, and that’s a good thing, that’s a good note for everyone listening, whether you’re looking for a job, whether you’re looking for a client, whether you’re looking for an investor, whether you’re looking for anyone to come out and help, the 8th or 12th contact. I even think about someone who you know well, who you’ve hung out with a bunch of times as your friend is probably more likely to want to work with you or something like that than someone you just kind of solicit from. So that’s amazing advice. Wyatt, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, telling us about, first of all, where we stand in just general industry of finding and getting jobs as well as getting the right talent for your company, but also some great advice about what we can do to always be the type of people that companies will want, that customers will want, that investors will want, all the things that we all need to make our dreams happen. And just want to remind everyone that this is a wonderful statistic, 8th to 12th contact, which means just kind of keep at it.
Yeah, repetition. And you can take no for an answer but don’t take no answer as a no.
Yeah, that’s a great way to flip that whole thing. We don’t take no for an answer. Well, some people get in trouble not taking no for an answer on certain things, but…
You can take no for an answer. If someone says, “No, it’s not going to work,” then okay, but don’t take no answer for a no. So if someone doesn’t answer, if they don’t give you a no, that’s still a possible yes.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. That is amazing. And I also, as always, want to thank everyone out there listening and, Wyatt, if anyone listening is either looking for a job or looking for talent in the Denver area, what will be the best way someone get a hold of you?
Absolutely. wyatt@pagegroupsolutions.com, or find me on LinkedIn, Wyatt Carr, you should be able to find me fairly easily. Happy to help in any way.
All right, that sounds wonderful. Thank you again, and I hope you all have a wonderful 2025.
Awesome. Thank you.
Important Links:
- Wyatt’s Email address: wyatt@pagegroupsolutions.com
- Wyatt on LinkedIn
- Page Group Solutions
About Wyatt Carr
Wyatt Carr is a distinguished professional in the realm of technical staffing and human resources, currently based in Denver, Colorado. As the Vice President at The Page Group, Wyatt is pioneering the launch of a new staffing company, bringing his wealth of experience and leadership to the forefront.
With a robust background from working at some of the largest staffing agencies in the US, including INSPYR Solutions and TEKsystems, Wyatt has excelled in roles from Recruiter to Delivery Director, managing large teams and complex recruitment operations for tech giants like Meta, Apple, Amazon, and ServiceNow.
Wyatt’s commitment extends beyond the corporate world; he is a passionate advocate for economic empowerment, volunteering as a Financial Mentor at CrossPurpose, Career Specialist with Us in Technology, and Business Advisor for the Rocky Mountain MicroFinance Institute. He also supports veterans through his role as a Career Specialist with Hire Heroes USA.
His academic achievements include a Bachelor of Science from California Polytechnic University, where he also demonstrated leadership by holding various roles in student organizations, earning multiple awards for his contributions.
Wyatt is known not only for his professional prowess but also for his dedication to learning, ethical leadership, and fitness. His combination of industry expertise, community involvement, and personal integrity makes him a standout figure in both business and social circles.