Daniel Botero (00:00)
All right, welcome, welcome, welcome back to another episode of the How to Get a Job podcast. Today we have a returning guest. I have Nas Delam here, and she is the founder and CEO of Peak Potential Professional Coaching. And we're here to talk about all things AI when it comes to getting a job. Nas, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?
Naz Delam (00:21)
Thank you, Danielle. Thanks for having me on this podcast again. I'm pretty excited to delve into AI and everything that's come with the job search.
Daniel Botero (00:31)
enjoyed our last conversation. I know it's been some time since we last talked about this, but a lot like I think when we first talked about AI was just like a buzzword, and maybe people were like, it's a trend, it might not be a trend. It is not a trend. It is here, it is here to stay. so you have a lot of experience in AI working for some of the biggest technology companies in the AI field. tell us, like, in your perspective, how has AI
changed the way people look for jobs on pretty much every side of the table too.
Naz Delam (01:05)
Tremendously, Daniel. And I can say it's changing every month. The more progress we are seeing, the vision is changing, the mindset of folks is changing on both sides of the table. Hiring managers have different mindsets. Applicants now have different mindsets. And I can see applicants are now more confused. They don't know what to do with this ever-changing market. That's things are happening, hiring manager expectations are up and down, and they don't know where to go.
Daniel Botero (01:23)
Yeah.
Naz Delam (01:32)
And now there's all of these AI tools that's getting involved in the application process. I don't know if you saw Meta release this AI agent that you give it the resume and it will give you the roles, or it will tell you, you're not a good fit to apply for this role. It actually prohibits you from application. I've tried it myself. There was an opening at Meta, and I was trying my own resume, was telling me, you can't do this because you don't have these keyboards.
So now we are in a world of, should we do multi page resumes? Because now I don't have all my keywords in this one page. So everything is changing and shifting and we can talk through multiple fronts of this together.
Daniel Botero (02:09)
What what I find really interesting is that like before and I say before, probably even before COVID, like a resume was the way kinda like it was a really important thing to get visibility. And people would invest a lot of money into resume writers. In fact
I've seen I've spoken to more resume writers in the last couple of weeks than I did in the last couple of years because what people would pay three, four, five hundred, two thousand dollars when it was an executive resume, they're saying, hey, like AI can write resumes. And then I I I was getting ready for to record a YouTube video, and I saw that like 81% of job seekers are now using AI for the job search process, primarily like, hey, like can you redo my resume and so on.
But then we're seeing when I look into this data, we're seeing that companies are getting so many more applications because of auto apply button. But then everyone has a good resume because AI will make everybody's resume as perfect as they as they can, and probably even exaggerate more than the person will will say themselves, which then makes it harder for the company to filter through the hundreds of resumes, if not thousands of resumes that are all qualified.
Because the AI made the resumes qualified. And so it just becomes a process where now companies take longer to go through resumes to figure out which ones are real, which ones are not. And even if they're using AI to filter them, there we have now seen, I saw another article, the companies are increasing the num the like the the like what are they called like assessments to make sure that you actually know what you're like you're doing, whether that's coding assessment or whether that's some technical interviews or
And so on.
Naz Delam (03:57)
You made a very good point. The numbers of applicants ratio to the job opening. And I can see it with my open roles. Thousands of applications coming in. And in this market, code application alone is not gonna lead to an offer. That is pretty obvious, right? So it depends on when are you applying. Are you in the first 20 of the resumes that the hiring manager is gonna review? Perfect. Maybe you get into the funnel. But if you're late,
If you're the thousandth resume that's coming in, nobody's gonna take a look at that. Probably you're gonna get an automated rejection email after they close that rollout. So that's one point is that am I going through cold applications only? The other point is well, everybody's resumes is now at some level of a standard with AI. But also, also, how are you going to differentiate your resume from all the other resumes that's coming in and generated with AI tools?
Daniel Botero (04:44)
Yep. Mm-hmm.
Naz Delam (04:54)
And that's the point that you have to pay a lot more attention to. Not feeding in the AI generated resume directly into the application. Look at your resume. Take five seconds. Ask yourself, am I gonna hire myself for this role? If I'm a hiring manager, what would I say on this resume? When I ask this to so many people who come to me and say, I can't get the applications through, they say no. That's a simple question. No, I'm not gonna hire myself. Then I ask why.
And the person say, because I don't have, you know, enough technical skills on this area. Then I say, why are you applying? That's your reply, right? So do your verification after that generation of AI resume. And I can talk through things that right now is very important in the resumes, is not those ATS keyboards anymore. Number one thing that I want to see right now as a hiring manager in anybody's resume is technical judgment.
Daniel Botero (05:54)
Say that again. They're you're looking for technical judgment. And how how do you how do you communicate that in a resume?
Naz Delam (05:57)
Yeah, technical judgment.
How do you communicate? How do you showcase your technical judgment as a senior engineer plus? It's trade-offs. It's being able to wear a product hat, being able to wear an engineering hat, and being able to wear a business hat all at the same time. When you get a feature, you drive that feature in a way that it's accelerates the business outcome. You're not just going to, I led this project and implement it with tool one, two, and three.
That led to a 40% increase in performance. This is the ordinary bullet points you see today in the resume. In this market, that has to change. I got this feature. I collaborated with product managers, marketing teams, and I actually did user study. And I realized that we have to pivot from the initial idea. I proposed two options to my partners, option A and option B, which led to better business outcomes.
We determined we go with option A collaboratively, and it ended up we actually increased the performance by X amount of number just by doing that analysis. See, today AI can code for you. What are you bringing into the table? Is that judgment.
Daniel Botero (07:21)
Two so I I think that to me that makes a lot of sense now. But I guess the question that always comes into my head is like
getting the application in it's not it's is it's not the issue, right? Like and to your point, now there's auto the AI can apply for you, so and it can even it's only gonna get better at applying for the right roles. What happens in a world when a company has a job opening and there's a million applications, like literally a million applications, because everyone is now using some sort of application agent for you.
Naz Delam (07:51)
Yeah, I mean not all those million applications gonna go through. That's the number one. Second is a lot of companies also using AI on their side to filter through these applications. And the prompts that I'm seeing they're using, they're not filtering your application via tools or programming languages or how much X percentage of revenue addition you have done. They're filtering it through your non technical skills and AI enablement skills.
Because when I hire somebody right now to come to my team, I want two important things. I need that person to be very good at communication, very good at collaboration and technical judgment, and very good at AI enablement. Are they able to automate things within this team using AI? Have they done that? What's their level of AI proficiency?
Daniel Botero (08:44)
Does networking, messaging people on LinkedIn, emailing, cold emailing, like does having a personal brand, does any of that get become more or less important in 2026?
Naz Delam (08:57)
Yeah. Double double your
outreach to people from your application. So if you have two applications per week, have four reach outs in this market. Don't rely on core application. With the data, data showed like over millions of applications reviewed in twenty twenty six. If you're solely relying on code application, you'll have eighty percent less chance with somebody who's actually doing outreach.
And you will have four to eight months of to offer time, which is very long time. And within people I work with, a lot of them got roles through referrals, word of mouth, and then putting themselves out there, starting to message people, hey, I'm interested in this role. Do you want to have a 20-minute chat with me? Or, you know, reaching out to their network, reaching out to their friends, putting themselves out in the market, as you said, personal brand, you're you're going in as a staff engineer. What have you built in this community?
In this industry, showcasing that on your LinkedIn profile. So it's more about cold applications are outbound. So I'm going and applying. Can you actually bring people to you? Can you be the magnet in the industry that hiring managers and recruiters find you? And that also opens another segue with LinkedIn profile.
investing on your profile, investing in the content that actually can bring in recruiters and hire you managers because they find you on LinkedIn. When a job application opens, I myself go on LinkedIn and I search for people and I message them. Who I pick? Who do you think I pick, Daniel? Whether I have an ML role open. Who do I go to and message them?
Daniel Botero (10:43)
The people that I'm seeing on LinkedIn over and over again. Like the people that I see that I I c that I am connecting with the with with their with the with the what they're writing. I I think ultimately a and this is kinda how I think about hiring to to just kinda answer your question maybe in a long winded
At the end of the day, anytime a company makes a hiring decision, they're what they're doing is that they're making an investment. Because if they go and pay you Nas a million dollars a year, they can't use that million dollars a year to open to to invest in AI data centers per se, right? Because I we've seen a lot of companies make shifts from, hey, we need to lay off people so that we can use that money to then im AI infrastructure, right? But it it could also work the other way around. Like we're not gonna go.
Naz Delam (11:24)
Right.
Daniel Botero (11:30)
Build an office and you building, but because we're gonna go hire more people, right? So it's an investment. Because at the end of the day, all these companies, they're legally bound to the shareholders, not to their employees and not to their customers, to the shareholders. So anytime they hire someone, they're making an investment. And when you look at what making an investment means, is that you're always looking for low risk, high return. So when we hire, what
Ultimately, a company is looking for what a hire manager is looking for for a recruiter is looking for is are they a low risk hire with high potential? Meaning, like I want to hire somebody who's really smart, they understand how to do it, but I also don't want to hire somebody who's gonna be here for three months and then leave, right? Because of the cost. So what the whole if I if I if if I think about it that way, the whole interview process or the whole application process from application to salary negotiation stage.
It's all about me getting enough data to make sure this is a low risk, high potential employee. So why are referrals important? Why is networking important? It's because that the manager, the recruiter, your potential coworker ha is vouching for you because if you're just judging somebody on an application or a resume, a resume is the most biased document in the world, then it it's it's hard to tell what's true or what's false versus
your LinkedIn profile, it's a little bit more accurate generally speaking than your resume because it's more public. So people are less likely to lie on it. And then if I get a referral from someone,
your resume or your application is as good as the relationship or trust that I have for the person that referred to you. And if we take that further and you build the brand and you're creating content and I see you're talking about the things that I'm looking for and you're talking about your past performance. Well past performance is the best indicator of future performance. So when I put all those pieces together, a good resume slash application, you're getting referred by someone, your LinkedIn profile is on point.
And I'm seeing your content or your brand all backing up the story that you're telling me in your application, you become low risk, high, high reward employee. That person gets the job.
Naz Delam (13:47)
That's well done. Well said. And low risk, I wanna add to that. Low risk, yes, true, somebody who's not gonna leave, but as a hiring manager, I don't really care about that part, right? If I know, like what is it that's gonna tell me you're not gonna leave? I can't guarantee anyone not leaving the team. People may come in that I think they're not gonna leave and they leave tomorrow. In my perspective as a hiring manager, a low risk candidate, it's someone with a high technical debt. It's someone who is a problem solver.
A high risk candidate is someone I bring into my team and is a shallow thinker. That's when I'm in trouble. Because I spent hiring costs a lot. I spent so much money to hire somebody. It's cost. Going through interviews, my team costs, all of those stuff. Right.
Daniel Botero (14:31)
productivity, right? What happens when
you don't have that person in the in yeah.
Naz Delam (14:35)
Right.
And the worst thing can happen if that person is a shallow thinker. And now that person has to work with Claude. How that person is gonna out a smart Claude? I want people who can out a smart AI agents. I do not want people who replicate AI agents. And that's where you win in this market. How do you showcase you can out a smart AI agents? Is your technical depth and your technical judgment.
If you can showcase that in your LinkedIn profile in five seconds, you can win inbound recruiters. Hiring managers will come to you. You will see. You can showcase that via content. You can showcase that via your depth of knowledge within your past experience, as you said, Daniel. So don't just put things that is shallow on your LinkedIn.
Daniel Botero (15:24)
Can you give us a couple of examples of how you would do that in your content or in your LinkedIn profile?
Naz Delam (15:30)
Yeah. One good example, actually I heard this from a recruiter. and he told me I do not go to People with their in their LinkedIn headline, they put tools. Right. You your headline is the the best and like the five second place that someone will look at your profile. If your headline is software engineer, C, I don't know, JavaScript.
Is that someone with technical debt? Someone who doesn't understand in this market languages and tools does not matter anymore. What are you bringing to the table? Versus someone who says software engineers, problem solver at a scale, built five plus applications with 200 million users. See the difference.
Daniel Botero (16:22)
Yeah. Now it's really quick. Your camera is frozen on my end. I don't know if you see yourself frozen or not. interesting. I can hear you. Okay, there you go. Yeah, let's let's do this because I just don't know what's recorded. I know so the way that Riverside works is that is there is record it separately. So even if the Wi Fi drops or anything, that doesn't matter. I'm gonna kind of go back to like if you can resay.
Naz Delam (16:28)
Nope. Can you see me? Let me restart.
Is it good now?
Daniel Botero (16:50)
'Cause this what we can edit this. We're not live right now. if you can say the example of how you showcase that on your LinkedIn again, that would be super helpful. Yeah. You could just th that that question's already asked, so you can go ahead and answer. Yeah.
Naz Delam (17:07)
So one way of doing that is your LinkedIn headline. That's one of the most important places that in five seconds you showcase to somebody who comes to your LinkedIn to continue to look at your LinkedIn profile. I heard this from an actual recruiter right now recruiting in this market from a top big tech company. He told me if I see these people on their headlines, they put a lot of tools and jargons that really doesn't match them. Like they pulled C, JavaScript, Angular.js as as technologies.
I realize this person doesn't have technical depth. Who doesn't understand tools in this market or in this world that we are living in is not a winner on my headline. A winner headline is someone that shows technical depth, technical judgment, and ownership at a scale. Somebody like software engineer, problem solver at heart, solved five plus different larger scale distributed system problems for streaming.
Give it a niche. What are you interested in? That is a winner headline. So that's one part of your LinkedIn profile you can optimize.
Daniel Botero (18:13)
How would you then do that in your maybe about me pay about me section, your content or even maybe you're employed and you're afraid to put some of those things out there? So how do you balance that I am employed but maybe not happy with my job and so I'm trying to build this brand?
Naz Delam (18:32)
I never lived like that, right? If I never bounded my LinkedIn profile to the employer. Your LinkedIn profile is not your employer profile, it's your career profile. And I've always told all my employees, I'm always looking. I'm always looking and I'm always talking and I'm always taking interviews. It's a way for me to know the market, to know what other people are doing, to learn and network with people.
So that's expectation set. So if you're afraid from employer knowing your job searching, that's a number one red flag you have to fix.
Daniel Botero (19:07)
Let's play devil's advocate here. Like, let me put myself I'm hearing this podcast, and I say, Nas, that is easy for you to say. You have been a executive director, you've been in, worked for Netflix, you've worked for LinkedIn, you've worked for all these brands. You can get a job in a week if you needed to. I can't afford that. I don't do I can't like.
I I it's too scary for me. Who like what would you say to me? What would you s somebody l listening this probably is thinking that.
Naz Delam (19:43)
Yeah, yeah.
I mean from outside looking at me, it sounds like that, but from inside it's not like this. When I started, I didn't work for any big company. I worked for small companies. And I found the opportunities while I was working in the companies, not when I was job searching. None of these opportunities, none of these companies I work for came for me doing the job search. It came out me having a good job and being happy with my job but still looking.
And that's it happened to me even before I was scared to put myself out there. I was scared to put tell my employer, hey, I'm interviewing. I actually, when I was working at this small company called MyVest, when Netflix opportunity came, they invited me to office to work from there for one day. And I told my employer that, hey, do you allow me to work from another company's office for one day? Because they're they're recruiting me. And yes, I could have lost my job.
But the fact is, does it really matter? If my employer, my perspective is if my employer value me, they'll do everything they can to make me stay. And on the other side, they value my career growth. So I know it's a risk, and some people don't want to take that risk, but that's a risk I took that made me successful and rich here. If we don't take that risk, well, we'll just stay small and we'll follow what our employer is saying.
Make sure we are not doing anything on LinkedIn. Don't build any personal brand. Then there you are. The employer is not gonna keep you. One day they're like, goodbye.
Daniel Botero (21:23)
I have a theory, making a little pivot from this conversation. I have a theory, and selfishly I will love to get fly it, like share with you and see. knowing that you work on this stuff, if I'm maybe right, or maybe we're heading there. I have a theory that applications are gonna be gone because.
Right now, you're into my AI versus the company's AI. And so it's just this battle of AI. Where I think companies are just gonna get to a point where it's just not efficient. The way that we look for jobs today is just not efficient for for the job seeker and it's not efficient for the for the company itself. And because of that inefficiency, you have really long
Interviewing cycles that cost a lot of money and you have this l really long periods of unemployment that can happen to people that like people are losing skill sets, confidence, and it's just as an economy, as a country, it's just inefficient the way it's done. And now we have the technology to do better matching per se. So my prediction, and again, this is just my moonshot prediction. I predict that in the future, I don't know if it's a year, five years or not.
I think applications go are gone, but companies will actually have AIs that will be able to predict the success to you and be like DM you and be like like kind of like like a
Like a movie come like like like I think about celebrities or athletes where they come and recruit you and say, Hey Nas, based on everything we know about you from the web, not just LinkedIn, what you post on all your social media, what we what we gather in the world, your interests, your passion, what you love, your skill sets, your your personal information that we got from the dark web. What based on everything we know, there's a ninety-nine point three percent chance.
That this is the perfect role for you that will allow you to maximize your earning income while maximize profit or or maximize profitability for the company. And we just want to give you, we just want to offer you the job. No interview, no assessments, no nothing. It is essentially just an efficient way of saying, let's put the right person in the right place.
Naz Delam (23:35)
Where do you find this right person, people? I think LinkedIn is going to become the place, at least for now, is the place of profiles. And your personal brand is going to be more and more important. In old days, we were like, you know, I'm always gonna have a nine to five. I'm gonna apply and go to somewhere else after that. As you rightly said.
Daniel Botero (23:44)
Yep. Yep.
Naz Delam (23:56)
It's not going to be the fact that you can just apply and people are gonna find you and now you have to invest in that profile, invest in that personal brand, invest in putting yourself out there and solve problems.
Daniel Botero (24:08)
Yeah.
And that and that's like the the s the the trend that I see as I as I work with tons of career coaches is like I I ask like I'm always asking our clients like what what are you seeing in the market? Like what are the best success stories that you're that you're getting? The people with the biggest increase, the people that are getting the jobs of the best companies, the people that are getting faster, the people that are getting like a really good application to interview ratio, what do they have in common? And it's by far
The strategies are moving towards more of how they market themselves, which brings in opportunity. So, like, it's like one of the things I see career coaches, like they're building and treating every job seeker like if they're they're a business, and they're building a whole brand and a story and an identity and a strategy to increase visibility. Because what they found, and again, I say what they found.
Is they get a job seeker, and what used to work before, which is like here's a new resume, here's your cover letter, here's an update of your LinkedIn, is no longer enough. And so what now happens is like here's your banner, here's your about me section, here's here's about like they've we have coaches that we are seeing that write content for their clients and say, here's one month of content.
that you can write or here's ninety days of content you post three times a week and this is how you're gonna communicate your story, your value. And they even help them build their own personal pitch deck so they can pitch themselves when they get hit but when they get a message from their recruiters. And those are the people that are getting the best jobs fastest.
Naz Delam (25:48)
Right. I have a triangle framework and I give it in three places. One part is positioning, exactly what you said, right? I position myself very well. I have a good pitch. I know what I'm gonna bring to the table. I know what I drive at my current work. I know myself very well, I know my strength, I can position myself very well for the rule. So that's one part. But positioning
Without authentic proof, it's gonna fail. And that's what I see. People go in and position themselves really well. The r the the resumes, wow, amazing. The first question I ask the person tell me how your work impacts company strategy. They stock. Cause there is no debt. Positioning doesn't have proof.
Does your LinkedIn bullet points is not the proof, right? The bullet points is how you're going into that interviews, how you're talking and owning your work. That I am the driver. I'm not just sitting there and getting work done. I'm the driver, I understand what I own, I understand the scope, and I know how to make good technical judgments.
A lot of people go there with that positioning, with that fancy about section, but they can't pass, they can't pass hiring manager rounds. That's where they get a stock. There's multiple places in JavaSearch you get a stock. One is hiring manager rounds. If you get a stock at that, that's a signal that your proof is not working. You have a good resume. You position very well. You're going through the application, but proof is not working well.
Daniel Botero (27:22)
Mm.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Nas, tell me a little bit more about how you work with job seekers. How would you help them? Who would you help?
Naz Delam (27:42)
Yeah, so I help basically software engineers, data engineers, ML engineers, AI engineers at senior level class who are seeking either roles or they're stocking promotions, or there is a goal they want to have in their career that they can a aim it and achieve it on their own. So they come to me with different goals. One of it is job search. So I do have the job search program where people come in.
starting with that assessment and really understanding where is it that they're blocked. For me, I'm not just accepting anyone in the program. I do have certain personality traits I need these people who come to the program have. And one of the most important ones is grit. If you don't have grit, you're not gonna get successful in anything, especially job search in this market is very hard. You should be able to accept failures, learn, grow and redo.
And that's a recipe to job search right now. Know where you're stuck, accept the failed interview, grow yourself to the next level. And that's the framework that I have. I have a seven steps, you go one by one, unblock them at every stage of the interview, starting with the first applications and reach outs. Does your resume get picked? I had people who go through referrals, hiring manager, look at the resume, he says no.
So the referrals is not gonna work if that resume is not speaking to the best positioning for that role. When we pass that, now we focus on hiring manager call. Do you communicate there? Are you articulating well? Do you do you showcase your proof very well in the interview?
Do you showcase technical judgment, AI enablement? These are skills that is very important in this market. Do you showcase you can cross-collaborate and debate with people? Do you have influence without authority? Especially as a senior plus engineer, these are rarer skills and rare niches that I will fast follow somebody else through this job search.
Daniel Botero (29:44)
Hmm.
Naz Delam (29:46)
You pass that hiring manager, you're on block, now it's technical. So I work with them on their technical skills, coding interviews, system design, AI, ML, whatever it takes, product design interviews, to prep them for passing the technical rounds. And then it comes to on-site. If somebody is stuck at on-site, there is one reason: technical debt.
Working on that technical depth depends on what is your depth. This is a IML going one level deeper, studying a topic, building those roadmaps, and unblock you until you get offer.
Daniel Botero (30:22)
If I am listening to this and that what you said is like I can see why I'm stuck. I would love to work with someone like you. Where can they connect with you?
Naz Delam (30:30)
Right. They can connect with me on LinkedIn. You can just go on top of my LinkedIn and book an appointment.
Daniel Botero (30:36)
Amazing. Nas, always a pleasure having you in the podcast. Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Thanks for your time. And if you're listening to this and you know, software engineer or you are looking for a job, make sure you reach out to Nas. Thanks so much for listening. Don't forget to like and subscribe. And we'll see you on the next episode. Bye, everyone.
Naz Delam (30:55)
Thank you.
