About Us

Proven process to start your job search

John Bates became the Job Guy in 2004 after a seven-year adventure with one of the world’s largest career management firms. After being trained by some of the most experienced coaches in the business and rising to regional director of client services, he had the opportunity to brainstorm the hiring process with over 4000 hiring managers. Their input formed the foundation for what has become the Job Guy model. A proven success for over 19 years, helping over 1700 job seekers in their pursuit of more meaningful careers, all with the use of proven and tested methodology.

Our Team

John Bates

I am a career changer myself.

My first career was in retail management where I owned P & L responsibility for a $70 million 350-employee territory. My latest assignment there involved me taking over a territory from a colleague who had just left the company. Little did I know that this colleague would play a key role in defining my second career two years later!

It was then that I applied to a business generalist job that had appeared in the Boston Globe…

  • The colleague who I had replaced had been charged with screening applicants for career advisor jobs for the career management firm at which he then worked. The company’s new president wanted to bring in “unspoiled” people and did not want to hire experienced career coaches. My friend said I would be great at the job even though I had no idea that the field even existed before that day.

    In short order I found out why career management was becoming so popular. I loved the variety of clients that came through my door. I was successful helping executives from all sorts of industries and functions. I learned how to manage careers for people who were infinitely smarter than me in their fields of expertise. Every hour represented new challenges.

    About a year into this engagement, I was recruited by the owner of a staffing firm to come work for him. He had just hired one of my clients who raved about her experience with me as her coach. My tenure as a recruiter offered me a new perspective on hiring and paid better, but it was not for me. I simply didn’t get the same charge out of working for companies as I did coaching job seekers. In less than a year, I was back to the career management firm.

    For the next five years I managed client services for the firm’s MA, RI, and NH offices. Eleven career coaches, a resume writer, and a research director reported to me. One of my primary duties was to present day-long job search seminars to the executive-level clients in those offices. While the primary purpose of these workshops was to educate the clients, I also used the forum to survey these execs on their hiring manager perspective regarding candidate selection. This was great because I was able to foresee trends in hiring, particularly at a time when the Internet was disrupting the job search process.

    I was able to use these clients as a proving ground to develop my own approach on career changing, resumes, interviewing, networking, and salary negotiations. Unfortunately, my employer chose not to listen to what the clients were saying in some critical areas outside my control. Client success and satisfaction began to suffer.

    It was my job to deal with more and more unhappy clients. One of the reasons that I was promoted in the first place was because I am good at handling conflict and deescalating tense situations. I was able to turn around nearly all the clients who came to me. Those clients never again thought well of my employer, but they liked me enough to ask me to work with them and their friends and family privately once their contracts with my employer expired. Job Guy was born from the need to service these people.

    As Job Guy I have been free to evolve my tools and techniques to remain current with the way jobs are filled today. I have complete control over service delivery. The result has been awesome. Since my start in 2004 I have been able to help over 1700 job seekers in their pursuit of more meaningful careers.

Lindsay Hofbauer

We are all career changers.

I am passionate about helping career seekers achieve their goals and find happiness in their next position. As someone who has experienced the quest for the defining “career success” and gone through the process of a deep reflection into my strengths (and maximizing them) I know firsthand the struggle of not knowing where to start with a search. The hours spent trying to write the ‘perfect’ resume or trying to pivot into a new industry could have been saved had I partnered with someone who already knew the ins and outs of the ATS (Applicant Tracking System), spoke with recruiters weekly on changes in trends, or had the advice of hundreds of hiring managers.

  • My experience in marketing, business, and development has led me to spend the past few years supporting executive and legal talent in their career transitions and creating personal branding packages to increase visibility, attract new clients, or drive sales.  

    I take a highly personalized approach to our writing services and the personal branding for your career transition. Your career tools should be specific to you, not part of a mass production. The clients I supported have secured opportunities or work across multiple industries including: finance, legal, agriculture, human resources, tech, and many more.

    Combining John’s arsenal of tools and expertise with my marketing and writing experience, together we have a streamlined process to provide a personalized service for your pursuit of a meaningful career.

There are lots of people you could work with, so why partner with Job Guy?

Our approach is different.

I am often asked to describe what differentiates the Job Guy approach from the hundreds(thousands) of other career coaching, resume writing, and recruiting services that can be easily found via Google+.

The main difference between the Job Guy approach and all the others is how I learned to do what I do. I truly believe that I am the only career coach in the country to learn what I did, from whom I did, in the way that I did.

The Backstory

Early in my career, I earned the opportunity to conduct weekly job search workshops for the clients of my employer at the time. That company catered strictly to executives, meaning that I was presenting to a captive audience of 8 to 12 hiring manager level clients every week for nearly 7 years. Not by accident, I was diligent about surveying this audience for their thoughts on job search and careers from both hiring authority and job seeker perspectives.

Over the course of my time there, I collected qualitative insights from nearly 4,000 hiring managers regarding their selection criteria and every step of their hiring processes. I came to understand what they liked in resumes, what they asked in interviews (and why), how they handled negotiations, and how they felt about networking.

Because of the sheer volume of clients served, it was common for a client to be considered by another client for an actual job. It was fascinating to see how differently the hiring manager and the candidate recalled those interactions. As you can imagine, this was a very precise way to see patterns of how candidate presentation was viewed from the hiring side. Over those years, I developed the foundation for my Job Guy tools based on the in-depth feedback I was getting. I wove most of my techniques and offerings into my employer’s core programs, giving me the opportunity to ensure they were effective and well-received by both job seekers and the job market before I ever launched the business.

While I learned a ton, the five most important takeaways from that time were (and still are):

  1. Job change is almost always driven by something negative (layoff, economics, work-life balance change, bad boss, unrealistic expectations, etc.). Most of my clients had historically taken jobs more to escape a bad situation than as part of a well-developed longer-term career plan that matched their skills, interests, and lifestyle needs.

  2. Career changers typically don’t take enough ownership for translating their skills and experience into the language of the new direction. This puts too much burden on networking partners and employers to connect the dots. Most won’t bother. BTW, I find that the same is true for later-career clients who are looking to “downsize” into smaller jobs.

  3. Resumes must be written to work at three levels: applicant tracking system, staffing team, and hiring manager. They must be written in scale with the targeted jobs, and not be focused on past experiences that may be very impressive, yet not appropriately connected to the next role.

  4. Interviews need to focus on the measures of success for the job in question and be tailored to the perspective of the individual (not the company) doing the interview. Successful candidates match their accomplishments and skills in a way that best aligns with the level and function of the job from the point of view of the individual across the “desk.”

  5. Networking is not only the most effective tool to minimize elimination by screeners, but also to tap into the hidden job market. Most job seekers burn through their network very quickly by asking for help instead of offering it. Networking partners will always be more excited to introduce us as a solution than they will be to hit up their network for favors.

Since launching Job Guy in 2004/5, I have worked with over 1,800 clients, most of whom are hiring managers. I excelled as president of an award-winning professional networking group, served three terms as president of our local chamber of commerce, and have coordinated roundtable discussions with top human resources leaders as an outsourced resource to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

These experiences have enabled us to further refine our focus on how employers make decisions to hire and how job seekers can gain competitive advantages by leveraging the strengths and weaknesses of the “system.”

The Job Guy team stands ready to share this expertise with you.