From Military Service to Job Offers: Interview Secrets from Pat Hubbell

0:00I'm the VHSOS podcast. Remember, don't try to see a transition grab the VHSOS life line. Today, Keith and I are finally going to learn how to use that big interview. We're sitting down with Pat Hubble of Candorful. If you haven't heard about this organization, get out your pen and paper. You need to write some things down because this is an amazing organization. It's going to definitely help you with that next interview. Keith, I'm thinking stepbrothers. I think we put on the tuxedos and we go on the interview together. What do you think? We could. I think if we show up in tuxedos, I'm going to show up on the tuxedo t-shirt, first of all. But yeah, I think they'll just be asking if we lost the bet. So let's just stick to nailing the interview instead and seeing what Pat can share with us today.

1:00But now, I'm looking forward to this episode. Interview is one of the biggest hurdles for our service members in transition, especially. So yeah, it's going to be a great episode. But before we do that, Sean, how are you doing? I'll talk to you soon. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. Definitely all in all doing very, very well. Thank you for asking. So let's jump right into this. We have Pat Hubble. She is the co-founder and executive director of Candleful, a nonprofit dedicated to helping transitioning service members, veterans, and military spouses excel in civilian job interviews through personalized mock interviews and coaching. With more than 40 years of experience and problem solving, career coaching and consulting, she has got thousands of veterans towards successful civilian careers. Pat works at Central Connecticut State University and Pat's work at Central Connecticut.

2:03Let's make sure you use all the words. Central Connecticut State University inspired the creation of Candleful's innovative mock interview matching platform which launches in 2017. A graduate of MIT Sloan and the University of Rhode Island, she continues to champion veteran success through Candleful and her service on the four block foundation board. I love this organization. This is an organization I used during my transition. So just a huge fan and supporter of it. I know it made a world difference for me going into the interview. Pat, I'm so happy you're here with us today. How you doing? I am absolutely fantastic. Like I would say earlier, it's a sunny Sunday morning in New Hampshire. I'm sorry, sunny Saturday morning in New Hampshire. And I get to talk with you guys, Keith and Sean, so what could be better? There you go. There you go. Now if everybody else in the world would understand that, we'd always have this show book. We'll bring it along. I do want to make a quick correction. It was Cornell University, not Central Connecticut State, but that's all just for the record books, nothing else.

3:03Fantastic. Fantastic. So you're not a veteran, Pat. And you decided that you wanted to work with this crazy bunch of people and support them. So how did that happen? What led you to want to work with veterans? So you know, it is a bit of a story. And I'm going to try to do, I want to try to use my, what we teach and interview skills to keep it from being too long a story. So there's all sorts of aspects of it, but I do believe that this was a trajectory that it was meant to be. So I'm a, I call myself a recovering engineer and a recovering management consultant, because those were my earlier parts of my career. And you kind of gave the background on that. I myself went through a transition difficulty. I made a choice to leave a job when my daughter was at sixth grade and stay home for a couple of years, because I, with the opportunity that presented itself was a travel opportunity. I personally didn't feel that was a good step with a, with a child entering her teen years. And it was very personal decision, but you know, I both wanted to stay at home during

4:06those years, but man, I did not want to walk away from that job. But I decided to do that. And in the six years that followed, I opened up a small business helping candidate, helping B.A. candidates prep to write their applications into top business schools. I ended up working with a lot of transitioning military just kind of by connections and ended up being a lot of people that were transitioning out. Their stories were, I don't know, far more intriguing than any non-military person I had listened to or worked with. So I became kind of very interested in this group. And then as I forced my transition back into the corporate working world, I struggled. I had a great pedigree. And I want people to hear this not as bragging, but as, is this you? Because if it's you, you're not the only one, right? At a great educational pedigree, at a great background, yes, I've taken some years off. My confidence was shot, but I had trouble getting a job because I hadn't learned something,

5:10and I'll get to what that is, but I'm not going to give it away yet. I hadn't learned something. About two years into that job search, yes, two years, I got accidentally networked into a role at Cornell, helping MBA students prep for their management consultant job. So that goes back to the management consulting piece. And it was great. I had to be far from home to take that job, which means I left my husband behind temporarily my daughter was now in college, but she was in college near home. So I was like 350 miles away from my life. But it was a good two years that I worked there. During that time, I recognized we had a lot of difficulty getting students to work with our alumni to prep for interviews. And the alumni wanted to help and the students wanted to help, but it was logistic mess. So I created with the help of IT, I created a matching platform. So hold that thought, I'm matching platform on their website. Okay. So I ended up moving back and working for a management consulting firm back here.

6:12When I was at Cornell, I worked with one amazing student, really like a boy guy. He was transitioning out of the army, his name is Pete Sukets. And he talked to me years later about the hardest parts of his transition. We're just not knowing what to do, not know how to sell himself, not knowing how to talk about himself, not wanting to talk about himself. Does this sound like you, right? And I worked with Pete directly when he was at Cornell. And years later, we talked about how we could help other veterans with solving this problem and having just worked at Cornell, creating this IT-based matching platform with alumni. I said to Pete, hey, what if we figured out, get a community of volunteer interview coaches together? And we worked to match transitioning military with this community. It was kind of like an offshoot of what I had done at Cornell, but let's do it privately with technology. And in the meantime, I had tremendous passion for this transition because I had struggled

7:16to return to the workforce as well. That was long and I am sorry, that's the story. That's a fantastic story. Love how all these chance things occurred, right? And essentially led to this. That's just a fantastic way to think, the whole thing worked out. And I'm going to break in. Yes, all these chance things. Were they chance things or was this the divine line that I was put on? I would wholeheartedly agree with that. Absolutely. Okay, so let's talk candorful. What is candorful? Why should people use candorful? Tell us all about it. I would love to talk about candorful rather than myself. That's great. So, candorful is as I alluded to. We are in a sense a matching platform. So think about Uber. I need to ride. There's a person with a car and Uber makes it so that these two people can get together and problem is solved. Candorful is the same thing. We have a community of volunteer interview coaches from industry.

8:20Right now, it's all about 130 coaches. These are all people who interview in the real world. They are not trained as coaches. They are trained as corporate workers who do interviewing as part of their day job. And in most cases, our hiring managers are on hiring teams. So the reason I point the difference between coaches versus hiring managers, these are people that exactly like you're going to deal with in real interviews. Not just coaches there that make you feel good about how you're doing. So 130 coaches there from companies like Amazon, PWC, Oracle, Verizon, Dell, and more. I'm probably leaving out somebody really important. A wide variety of coaches. And these people are dedicated to helping veterans and military spouses and people not quite yet veterans. Prepar practice to be interview ready. They all understand that while veterans and military spouses are most typically very prepared for civilian jobs, they are not prepared for civilian interviews.

9:24So it's just a simple way to get people up the curve, to be able to compete with civilians for the same jobs. Right? Let's see, we connect with our veterans and military spouses through a wide variety of organizations and opportunities like this one today. But we are, we connect with number one, almost important one, four block, which you can talk about more. It's very important to us right now. Four block dot org does great work with veterans and military spouses. They send their people to us. Hiring our heroes, heroes makes America, Amazon military pathways, commit foundation, onward to opportunity, a lot of great organizations send their folks to us. And that's how they learn about us. So we're kind of partnered with a wide variety. We are merged with four block, but we support all of these organizations. What do you think, Keith? I mean, this is, this was a huge thing for me. Like I didn't even know where to start.

10:25This organization at least helped me better prepare for the interview whereas to this day I still have never written and resumé it and I don't want to write a resume. So. No, it's, it's, it's an amazing service. It's, and I'm glad that it's caught on so much. I mean, I met Pat, I don't know if she remembers me, but I met Pat several years ago. Back when I was kind of getting my feet wet in the, in the mentorship community because I was offering like my interviews, kind of, as a freelance person and, and, you know, looking to see how I could help out, you know, kind of full and things of that nature. But I've even taken part of, uh, uh, kind of full services, you know, not too long ago. Uh, I was, I was looking at down the barrel of a possible job change and it up not happening. Um, but can't if I reached out and, you know, because it was a fairly high profile job that I was thinking about applying for and the interview, yeah, it was the, the prep, where the interview prep was, was amazing. Um, because even then what I love is they do, they, they set you up with someone similar

11:27to what you, well, just cause they can't do what you need, right? Like I, I've been in the workforce for six years at that point. I had done interviews and successfully and I was even mentoring other people on how to do interviews. But at the same time, I was going executive level at this point and executive level interviews are different than even mid career kind of interviews. So, you know, there's, there's differing mindset you have to have when you go into these things and Candorful does an amazing job of getting you set up, uh, it's kind of a multi tiered approach. But yeah, getting you, uh, eventually linked up with the right person to give you the proper services. So, um, yeah, no, I applaud everything that Candorful is doing. Um, so I guess, you know, you, you, you build your all's reputation on immediate feedback. Right? So, how does the structure change someone's confidence and performance between interview one and an interview three, uh, in a way that they can feel it in real time? I love the question. And before I answer that, I want to, um, you said some important interview three.

12:28So we encourage people to schedule three or more practice interviews. This comes from my personal passion that practicing one time is not enough because that first one you have could very well feel like a train wreck because it's your first one, especially if you are a newly transitioned or even process of transitioning military in the last interview you had was for at the yoga shop at the mall when you were 16, right? So, um, and we know that that's what we want you to do with us. I want you to have that first one with us. We don't want you to stop there. We want you to go to multiples past that. So you're kind of building your confidence and your skills. So notice I said, confidence first skills are really important, absolutely. But confidence is huge. So we started to answer your question. We started, um, I'm pausing. I want to emphasize three is not the limit you can do 10. You can do 12. Um, okay. Off that soap box. So we started mapping confidence levels. So we ask people now, I don't know Keith and Sean if we were asking us when you guys came

13:31through what we asked, started asking about two years ago, what you read your confidence level at zero to 10, which is so tough because there's no units. You know zero to 10, where are you? And the average comes in at 6.3 almost every month. I can check it every month. Um, I'm sorry, check it every quarter comes in almost exactly at 6.3. And then we ask if people complete two or more interviews, we ask them again. And the average comes in at 8.3. So you know, I consider that a significant improvement. I'd like to get it even even higher, but it says significant improvement. And this is, I can say that the average that people do to practice interviews, again, that would say would do more as an average. We do have people that do 10 or 15. But imagine if that two points is is achieved with two interviews. Imagine if you do four interviews, how is it going to make you feel? So A, we're big about data. B, we give verbal feedback right after the interview, right? So the, you know, it's 30 minute interview, 15 minutes spent giving verbal feedback.

14:35And then the coach goes into our technology system and enters a synopsis of the feedback. They just gave verbally, which goes out immediately to the candidate. And the candidate gets to review that before the next practice interview and before they're real interviews. And also very importantly with that, kind of rubric of, of our, yeah, rubric of feedback, they get an opportunity to give us feedback. So we are watching, I am watching the feedback that each candidate gives our coaches. And first of all, it's incredibly uplifting the things that are said, but everyone's in a while, if there is an issue where we're nip it in the bud, but it's actually very rare. I think we're seeing as a tremendous need for this is proven by the fact that people are like, oh my god, this is exactly what I needed. We just get amazing accolades. I'm sorry to sound arrogant, but it's true. People need this. It feels uncomfortable to practice, but it feels a lot less uncomfortable to practice

15:36with, with three or four or five of our coaches than it does when you're sitting in a real interview, falling apart. Yeah. And I just want to interject to use a cautionary tale like, and this is a good and a bad thing like in a way that candidates busy, like you all are booked up. And I know because my situation was somewhat urgent in that, you know, this opportunity for this executive level position kind of fell in my lap. I didn't see it coming. And so it was happening on equipment and God bless Pat for, you know, pulling some strings and getting me squeezed in kind of last minute. But we need, I'm just telling my listeners out there, y'all need to be proactive. And it takes time to do these interviews anyway, but even then like some of their calendars are pretty booked up. So don't wait. You know, if you're transitioning out and you think you might be looking for a job in the next six to eight months, start now, start prepping for the interviews now. Exactly. Thank you.

16:37So I hear frequently, I'm holding off to do my practice till right before my first interview. And the answer is don't do that. And part of it is logistics. And part of it is your brain is full at that point. You're hopefully researching the company, researching the people that you're going to interview with. You've been interviewing your mentally exhausted. So don't wait till that because you're not going to, you're not going to change behaviors easily when you're in that. But if you come to us six months in advance or, you know, at least a month in advance, you have a lot more flexibility in your calendar. Our coaches are all volunteers. We do not have the ability to say do a 40 hour week with us guys. They are donating one to two, maybe three hours per week. So even though we have 130 coaches, there's a limited number of hours available. And you have to go through an intake first where we teach you best practices. And that's actually where the, sometimes we have a bottom. I can, in fact, right now keep through due because we are getting a lot of attention after the four-life merger and working with organizations through Amazon like Heroes Make America. So we're full. We are experimenting with group intake.

17:37So we may launch that as a formal method and do it in the future. But yes, the sooner you can do this, the better. The sooner you can do this, the sooner you'll be able to change behaviors for the waiting to last minute. Yeah, absolutely. And Pat, I feel your pain. I try to get 40 hours a week out of Keith too. And the most I get is four hours a month. He's not lying. That's because of my job. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. Man. That was too good to pass up. So I'm so happy though that you clarified it's not three. It's 10 because it's funny. We've got one guy. They know that every, every other day I'm seeing a new one come up clearly as nervous. And I actually reached out to him like everything okay. Because maybe you needed moral support more than anything else. But if this is what you need, that's great. We tell people three is a good number to put as a floor.

18:41And because meeting do at least three. And again, the average is two. So you know, it is what it is. We're not going to handle the everybody's adults. If you want to stop it, zero one or two, that's on you, but you're going to do better if you do three. And the people who come through to do four, five, six, we know from their feedback that they are, their confidence levels going at a much higher, more, you know, maybe exponential rate is an exaggeration, but much faster and more impactful, positive slope. So yeah, I think it's an important thing to do. Because we've created an Uber-like or an Airbnb-like matching platform with zero dollars really. So we do have some limitations to how our technology is set up. So we use this three number to say do a minimum and we have three links we give you. People think we mean a minimum of three. We mean we do at least three. And someday, you know, with a lot more funding, we'll actually smooth out the technology.

19:41And if anybody wants to give a technology and kind donation, we are open to it. And that's exactly the point I was getting to is even today, when I tell other people about careful, I've been saying three because that's what I was told. That's what I believe. I'm glad you clarified that we can do more than three though because it's a fantastic service. And fairness, you might have been told that originally way back in 2018 and 2019, we launched, we had like 20 coaches. We limited it to three because we just didn't know what the demand would be. Now we know that if anything coaches like, hey, I haven't had a practice interview in a month, I miss it. So we've got room. But the bottlenecks the intake and we're working on fixing that. Okay. Fantastic. So that's a great segue into the next question. What's you guys just had this four block merger? So what's the future look like? How do you see, can, or form moving forward? I am so excited about the future. So we remain passionate and dedicated to the mission that we currently have, which is, let's make it so people can do on-demand interview practice and do it rapidly so that they can

20:45kind of come up that curve really fast. We remain incredibly, we are digging in even deeper to make sure that happens. We want to get the word out to more organizations, which requires resource support. And by merging with four block, we get that resource support in terms of their marketing, their fundraising, et cetera. So at, and we will, we're also kind of merging some parts of our methodology to their cohort based transitioning military preparation, right? So we will have a huge flow of four block people coming through. So that's one aspect. The other thing is, and I alluded to this when I was giving you my story, I said there was one thing I hadn't learned. What I hadn't learned was that networking is essential. Wait, this way back again, 2010. I had not learned that networking was essential to getting a job. 80% of jobs are achieved by networking.

21:4675, 70% of jobs are not ever posted, so you have to hear about them. And this is something that either people don't hear or just don't want to believe because it's overwhelming to think about, or they've heard about it, but they don't really get what to do with it. And they apply for jobs because applying for jobs is incredibly logical. It makes sense. I want a job. I will apply. I will get a job. It's just that since thousands of people can apply for that same job, the hiring manager or the recruiter may not even open the file and look because it got 3,000 people. Imagine what that would be like. I've got a look from 3,000 resumes. That's the reason to be excited about that work day. So if somebody, and I'm being sarcastic, so if somebody that I work with as a recruiter comes along and says, hey, I met this veteran or anybody. And they have some really cool skills. I hear we have an opening for whatever. Take a look at their resume. I look at their resume. Not only is it a decent resume, I hope, but Joe just recommended it.

22:50Well, that's the first person I'm going to reach out to. So that's the why behind networking. So when I learned that the hard way, I realized that we did the interview thing first, but I realized we also need to move into making people comfortable with networking. So we talk about this in all of our intake meetings, make sure people have heard about it through us. And the process of doing a soft launch of a similar portal that we do with interviewing, but for networking practice. So when we have about five coaches connected with that and kind of doing a soft launch with us, we're experimenting with things. Do we need to do that intake? That is a that is a bottle that can we do up? Can we rely on candidates to read a document instead, et cetera? But we just had our first person come through. He debriefed with us. He absolutely loved it. His name is Ion. Very grateful to you, Ion. And we are moving forward on launching that. So that's the technology next is where in content next is that we're continuing on with interviewing, but we're also doing networking.

23:51And for everybody who's listening about network, they should get to our job search by Steve Dolphin. I cannot help but recommend this book. War words at the answer is then you wanted. No, it's good stuff. And it's so true. I mean, everything you just spoke is complete truth. We had the bomb icon. It would have been dropping a lot right there. So just out of curiosity, well, for one, I'll just throw my name out there because you said you got a few folks that are on board for the networking mentorship stuff. I'm happy to maybe jump on board with that as well. I do a lot of mentorship of how to network, right? Because I feel the same way. We tell them network network network, but one, we don't do what you just did, which is telling why it works. And two, we're really going to sell it out of it. We don't tell them how to do it. Like, you know, we just say do it without like any practical pragmatic. It's very ambiguous. That's technology. Yeah, exactly. It's also very frustrating because more than half the people you reach out to are going to respond. And that does you've got to be prepared for that. Or you think you're just failing.

24:52Yeah, exactly. Now, I'd be interested in possibly helping out with that, but that's not the purpose of this episode. So I do have a good. You're going to hear from me. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, and we're getting close to time, but I did want to ask, you know, I wanted to ship the script a little bit in that. And we focus so much on the service members needing help with their interviews. But what would you say to the hiring managers that are out there? Because you know, you, we've got, you know, these employers that are, they get this better in resume. It looks great. And then the veteran comes in and crashes in their mindset. But from your vantage point, what do employers need to understand and adjust about how they interview veterans if they actually want to hire the talent that they say they quote unquote value? So I have probably mixed messaging, I'm going to say as well as controversial messaging. So I am a believer that the number one thing that you need to vet for in an interview is

25:56character. Now, I don't know that the world would agree with me on that. So because you, you can't, and there's other similar, you would call soft skills, but I actually do not think character is soft skill. Because you're not going to change someone's character, right? So if they have a history of strong character, who is getting the job done, includes working well with people, which sometimes means having to do ugly things like firing someone or speaking very bluntly with someone, et cetera. You as well as kindness and compassion, right? You can't, you can't teach that very easily. So number one, I think we've got to watch what we're looking for when we're hiring anybody. Okay. The other piece is, and I do think this is a minority. I hear about worry about bias. I do think most people are not as biased as the world is making us out to be.

26:57I think in fact, some structures perhaps are forcing us to think more that way, but the reality is I think most people are. But if you are a hiring manager who makes any assumptions about a veteran, any of them, this person might have PTSD, this person's strict, this person won't be kind, this person won't smile, this person will be whatever, no matter what it is, don't because they're individuals, right? So if Keith and Sean and I sat down together over a beer or wine, even though I'm not a veteran, I bet we'd find a lot of similarities. And I think we'd find a lot of differences, right? So I would say, you know, just like any time, get the biases out and I will say, I mean, worked with thousands upon thousands of veterans, I have seen zero. I'm sure it's there, but I've seen zero PTSD-type things into my interactions with them. I'm not saying it's not there. I'm just saying as someone who's working professionally with these people, I don't need to be thinking

28:01in terms of PTSD and there are people I know when you say veteran, the next thing they say is PTSD. And then they, yes, there's a perhaps a relationship, but a lot of veterans have never seen combat before. And those of us who are non-military have PTSD from other things at times. So, yes, so we got to get these conversations out of there. But I want to de-emphasize the bias one. I think that's a minor problem. It can be a problem. I would say the one piece of tactical advice I have is if you're sitting in an interview and you've got a veteran in front of you or a military spouse and they are in the first minute fulfilling your bias of this person's team rigid, guess what? They might be scared out of their mind. They might be incredibly nervous because this might be one of their first interviews and they've got a lot at stake. Family, nervous transition is really emotionally hard. So I would say, here's my advice. Smile at them and say, has your day gone? Just break the ice and let everything flow from there.

29:03Yeah. Great advice. No, I love it. We are at time though and I can keep going for another 30 minutes easy path, but Sean has been awfully quiet over there. So Sean, I'm going to let you put out the closing question. I'll still do the blur, but you can have the closing question and or thoughts. Okay. I was joining my coffee and ready for you to do your closing. So you call me off guard. Pat, first of all, thank you. Thank you for what you've done and what you're doing and for joining us this morning. I love the service. I love the one of those things that I've passed everybody I talked to to make sure that they know about it because it helped me. It's just a fantastic opportunity to learn and grow. So thank you for what you're doing. Before we close out, please tell us how the audience can either get in touch with you or Candorful or for block and whether they want to use the service or if they want to donate

30:06time, money, what have you, what's the best way to do all that? Excellent. You should have come with links, but I'm going to direct people to specific places on our website. So go to candorful.org. It's a weird word. It means full of honesty, which is what we want to be, full of honesty. Like we're going to tell you what you're doing well and tell you what you're not doing well. So C-A-N-D-O-R-F-U-L dot org. It's only one L, candorful dot org. And if you are interested in practicing interviews, if you are a veteran, a military spouse, a physician, a military, go to the top and get started. And it's obvious what to do from there. And just sign up for one intake. Just one, not three, right? We're just doing an intake first and we'll get you started on interviews. So we'd love to have you and help you. You'd be surprised. The only thing that can go wrong with a practice interview is your feelings might be gently hurt when we give you some honest advice, but we're also going to build you up. So there's just no risk involved. So come practice. Second, if you want to be a coach, go to candorful, sorry, too many to go into my head.

31:12Candorful.org. Again, and you can say go to the mission page and there is a link for if you're interested in being a coach or you can do info at candorful.com. Info at candorful.com. Just shoot us an email. I will see it and I will tell you how to schedule and join us for an information session for potential coaches. If you want to make a donation, thank you so much. You know, nonprofits who charge zero for their services have to exist with all the same bills that a for-profit does. Technology, paying people, we have to pay taxes at a different level, but we still have to pay, etc. So we do need funding and you can go to our website candorful.org and on every single page, you will see a donate button. Please, you know, anything five bucks, a million bucks, everything in between, we are very grateful. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you Pat, so much again for coming on and all things that you're doing for

32:12the military community. It's invaluable. It is so needed and you're doing an amazing job at it. So kudos, thank you. And I'll be happy to be an entire so family. We want to thank everyone for spending their time with us today. It's always great having you all along for the ride. Don't forget to check out all of our other episodes. Keep coming back for more stories, insight and support from the SOS crew. If you enjoyed this episode, give us a follow share of the show and tell a friend or two. Talk to your battle buddies, fire team, shipmates and winning-menging back, float-tation device that they need in transition. So no one drowns in the sea of transition. And as always, grab the vet SOS lifeline. Thank you, guys.