Listen, there are some great recruiters and some of them do a fantastic job and there's a legitimate need for people that do recruiting and they're in that role.

However, one of the drawbacks to recruiters is that they don't usually understand the subject matter of the positions they're hiring for and this can be a considerable problem, right?

Especially when they're trying to look at two people.

A recruiter might be looking at two accountants and trying to decide who's the better accountant when the recruiter themselves doesn't know anything about accounting.

They don't even know the basic terms.

That can be a big problem, right?

But how do they do it?

They go, okay, years of experience is the universal metric.

So they say, well, you've been an accountant for five years, you've been an accountant for 15 years, therefore you will be better, right?

We all know a lot of times that's false, right?

Let's admit this, okay?

It's crap.

Sometimes, yes, years of experience do matter, but sometimes they don't.

Sometimes they actually count against you.

I'd rather hire someone who's done that, but also done several other things and they can bring all those experiences to this role, but I'm in the minority.

So the other thing is that you can equalize, you can overcome weakness in any area, including lack of experience, if you do certain other things.

I already talked about networking.

I already talked about showing up.

Yeah, you could hire senior accountants with a lot of experience, but you know what?

I'm the only one that cared enough to show up for this job, thus showing that I actually care specifically about working here.

They have no affinity of working here.

They'll go anywhere that pays them, but I want to work here, and that does count for something.

Another thing is that if you are the most likable candidate, you go to the interview and you're the one that they click with the best.

They love you.

They enjoy the interview with you.

They want it to go on forever because they enjoy your company.

You get along great.

You click.

You're easy to talk to.

You're easy to understand.

You have the right attitude.

You're professional.

You don't take offense.

It's just easy to deal with you.

They'd much rather have that than someone who's got 10 years more experience than you, who is like gruff, aloof.

They kind of take offense easily.

They kind of are difficult to deal with, a bit crusty or spiky.

You know, you can make up for that with other things.

The number one thing is being likable.

Okay, so keep that in mind and work on what you have, and you can get around the whole lack of experience.

You know what?

The other thing is that everyone starts off with no experience, and that's where everybody starts.

The best employees start off with no experience.

Don't let anyone convince you you have no experience.

You've got a hell of a lot of experience.

You've been to school, right?

What did they do in school?

You had to show up on time.

You had to meet deadlines.

You had to ask for help when you needed help.

You needed to do extra work when you were falling behind and course correct.

You needed to be trainable to learn new material at a relatively fast clip.

You needed to be able to communicate with the instructor and understand their expectations and clarify those expectations if they were unclear to you, and so on.

You had to have a good work ethic, punctuality, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

What do you do on the job?

Well, you do things that involve all of those, right?

If they say, well, I'm concerned you don't have much experience, you could say, well, let's talk about my work ethic.

Let's talk about how I led a project.

Let's talk about how I worked in groups and interacted with many different types of people successfully.

Let's talk about the time that I was falling behind or the instructions were unclear, and I, on my own initiative, went to the instructor, got them to work with me, had a more of a one-on-one experience and overcame my disadvantages and got one of the best marks in the class.

Let's talk about all those experiences because that illustrates all the things I would need to do to be a kick-ass employee here.

So, just remember that.

You've got a lot of things you can talk about in the interview when they ask you about your experience, right, that's relevant.

Maybe, you know, it turns out you weren't learning, you weren't doing accounting.

For some of those experiences.

But it doesn't matter because it's making statements, very powerful statements about what you're like as a person and an employee, right?

So, all you've got to do is you've got to just prepare all this stuff and rehearse it right and then you can answer any question.

You'll have an answer for anything that they ask you.

Have you done this?

Yes.

Might not be in an accounting role, but it's over here, but it's exactly the same thing and I've done it and I know what to do.

So, you've got everything you need.

Just combine all these things together and knock it out of the park, okay?

Best of luck to you, Sugarplum.

That's a great question.