Career Coaching Secrets

Helping Professionals Thrive in the Job Market with Donna Shannon

• Davis Nguyen

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In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, our guest is Donna Shannon, a career coach, author, and speaker with over 15 years of experience helping professionals take control of their job search with confidence and clarity. As the President of Personal Touch Career Services, Donna specializes in crafting standout résumés, interview coaching, and demystifying the hiring process. We dive into strategies for navigating today’s job market, common pitfalls job seekers face, and how to authentically market yourself in a competitive landscape.

You can find her on:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnashannon/
https://www.personaltouchcareerservices.com/
https://www.facebook.com/DonnaShannonHaHa/
https://www.instagram.com/donnashannonhaha/


You can also watch this podcast on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/@CareerCoachingSecrets

If you are a career coach looking to grow your business you can find out more about Purple Circle at http://joinpurplecircle.com

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Donna Shannon:

When people contact me, specifically, they want to talk about the stand-up comedy thing. It's the hook in there. One thing's for sure, and this goes way, way back into the first classes I was teaching in 2004. Yeah, I would always get the feedback from the students, from our clients, that I take a boring topic and I make it more fun and interesting so that it sticks with them and they're able to apply it better.

Davis Nguyen:

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Nguyen, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. Before Purple Circle, I started and scaled several seven- and eight-figure career coaching businesses myself and consulted with two career coaching businesses that are now doing over $100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or just building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Rexhen Doda:

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Rejan, and today's guest is Donna Shannon. Donna is a master career director and COPE certified expert and the brains behind the personal touch career services. Over two decades in the field and background in recruiting, Donna brings serious strategy to the job search game. Also a stand-up comic, providing that career coaching can be both impactful and human. In this episode, we're going to dig into what makes a job seeker truly stand out and how coaches can help clients navigate algorithmic hiring systems and why humor is a secret weapon in an industry that often feels anything but light. If you're a fellow coach ready to laugh, learn, and elevate your clients' outcomes, it's my pleasure to welcome you on the show. Welcome, Donna.

Donna Shannon:

Hi, Rajen.

Rexhen Doda:

How are you? I'm doing great, and it's such a pleasure for me to always interview coaches that have so many years into the field. You are one of the senior coaches that I've interviewed, and maybe when you see some of our other podcast episodes once they come out you'll see that there's some other senior coaches that you might even know in the field donna i know it's been so many years but tell me what inspired you to become a coach

Donna Shannon:

yeah i'm really going to show my age here but back in 2004 i was working in human resources and honestly i was tired of having to cut qualified applicants who just didn't understand how the process worked so i started teaching these job searching workshops kind of on the side and over the years everything continued to grow and i was just doing so much materials for the course itself, like in 2009, it was like real apparent. I needed to either go all in and write the book and just commit to that, or I needed to drop all this nonsense and kind of focus on my HR career and go back to my next degree and things like that. And I stopped and I thought about it. And the thing that really excited me the most was when I was teaching those workshops and having people with that light hit their eyes when they suddenly realized the problems with their job search were not them personally. It wasn't because they were underqualified too old or not enough experience or trying to do an industry change or anything the problem was oftentimes their tactics and tactics can be changed and it's like all right yeah i'm all in hit the passion point so wrote the first edition of my book the first book i have out there get a job without going crazy i did keep doing my corporate job for quite a while but in 2011 i stepped off that corporate cliff so to speak and i've been doing my business full-time ever since

Rexhen Doda:

and how does the journey look like from the moment you started it to where you are today. I know like the industry has changed a lot and especially in like the recent years, it changes in months. So how does that look like?

Donna Shannon:

Yeah, I definitely do a lot to stay on top of industry trends. Like you want to know something funny. Those very first job search workshops I was teaching, I had like a 15 or 20 minute segment on how to fax your resume into a company. It was like a lot of what I was teaching was like, okay, here's all the things that you're doing that are pissing me off as an HR person. So Stop it! Obviously, I don't do that anymore. Although, I still relate to my grumpy recruiter roots, basically. But I am involved in organizations that keep us on those cutting edge. I'm involved in the National Resume Writers Association. I participated with our local CHRM chapter, Society and Resources Management, for a number of years. Just because I want to see the recruiting trends as they're coming out. And the laws that apply to recruitment. So, I'm not just going to sit back on my laurels. I always have to be evolving. to give my client the latest information too.

Rexhen Doda:

And when it comes to clients, is there a specific target group that you particularly work with? Maybe an industry, demographic, or a certain group of people that have a certain issue that you typically help them with?

Donna Shannon:

Sure. So one thing that's nice is that we've got some flexibility because in my company, we have a total of five career coaches and resume writers. It's not just me, it might by himself. And some of them have additional areas of expertise. In general, we have two silos So the first one is our niche industry, which is known as luxury lifestyle management or private service. What that means is people are taking care of multi-million dollar private estates. So estate managers, personal assistants, private chefs, butlers. Yes, it's still the real industry. Yes, people are making well into six figures doing those jobs. And we work with the professionals there. The flip side on the business end of things, we're working with people who are professionals, who are mid-career and above, all the way into the C-suite. A lot of them are going through a career transition or they haven't had to look for a job for five, 10, 15 years. Or another way to think about it is like tapping on the glass ceiling, but they haven't managed to break through it yet. We love helping people get over those hopes too.

Rexhen Doda:

What is like the marketing channel that today is working best for

Donna Shannon:

you? Certainly we have a very strong referral network. So about half of our business comes from clients who are referring other people to us. And we do have a formal process them out with that. We also have built relationships with recruiters, especially in our niche markets, that we have fostered those for, well, decades now at this point. Like I said, I'm going to show my age here. So those are a couple of things. I'm also very active on social media. I have over 8,000 followers on LinkedIn, published regularly in our newsletters, LinkedIn articles, things like that. We try to stay visible.

Rexhen Doda:

You brought out something interesting that might have been utilized by other coaches, but I haven't seen come up in the podcast. How does it work to have a relationship with other recruiters in a way that is like a win-win situation and is it like a partnership kind of deal or how does that work

Donna Shannon:

so basically because of these outside recruiters we don't necessarily like share commissions or things like that sometimes it's like if i'm able to help them source like a difficult to place position they might give me a referral fee but by and large the vast majority of them do not ask for like an affiliate fee on the resumes because they are earning so much money by placing these people that my like little referral back their way they're like please forgive me no i don't want your tiny 20 30 50 thing i just made 30 000 placing this person you're okay don it you're good

Rexhen Doda:

and have you been doing this always like working with recruiters or has this been a recent thing

Donna Shannon:

so it's actually kind of an interesting strategy because i think in 2010 or 2011 i started to realize that hey especially this niche industry the private service stuff i need to know who's out there and i had the brilliant idea of like let's do do win-wins and I started a series on my blog about the private service agencies and I would like have this questionnaire and same 10 questions that have people fill it out or I do an interview with them then we'd post the article on the blog and then when we had enough agencies I actually publish a ebook which is our guide to private service agencies we publish every three years so we're always updating that and what had started with oh we had all those relationships with me five or six recruiters we now have a stable of 60 different recruiters that we work with the published book has over 40 different recruiters and that's like a value add not just for the recruiters just hey here's all of our clients who are going to be checking this out it's definitely a benefit for our clients because we're able to give them lists of like hey here's reputable recruiters you should get to know always another value add honestly is the reason why they choose to work with us

Rexhen Doda:

in the future is there any goals with your coaching right now that you're working towards for the next one to three years

Donna Shannon:

one of my biggest goals in my business is i I don't want to write resumes ever again. I would much rather be coaching and then passing like all the writing services onto my writing team. By and large, most of that's been happening, but I get way more excited about setting a strategy for my business, developing better coaching programs. We're actually even in the process right now of pivoting one of our big coaching programs into a different format that's more based on what the clients are looking for. So rather than committing to like a six week or a three month coaching program, package, it's kind of like going to be a pay as you go. So still access to a lot of individual coaching time with me, but meeting people where they are instead of going, I want to sell you this thing.

Rexhen Doda:

And how does your team look like right now? And the reason why I want to ask this is not usually what I ask people, but since you mentioned, how does the team structure work for you right now?

Donna Shannon:

You know, it's really cool because I do have people who have different specialties. So as we know, anytime you've got some niches that you know a lot about, it just makes it easier as a writer or coach to deal with people in that industry. And I don't mean deal with them in a bad way. I mean like serve them better. So it's like I have one of the writers on my team who does all of our healthcare executives. I have another one who does all of my IT stuff. They know it inside out. And I'm like, you don't want me writing your IT resume. I haven't had one of those in a few years and I like it that way. That's why I have people I hired. Also, there's other people in my team who want more development opportunities. So Dia Klein, who's also my business development manager, I've been mentoring and coaching for three or four years now and she obviously really appreciate the growth opportunities but also she can expand what we offer to our clients too and even she's got different strengths than i do like she's an amazing interview coach because she's been a toastmasters coach for years like an award-winning toastmaster and speech speaker so she brings different perspectives than i do and sometimes it's like all right i need to match client based on personality as well as industry and it's great to have that kind of flexibility with a team

Rexhen Doda:

and since Since you obviously have grown your coaching business right now, is there any investment that you would recommend in terms of like, have you used any coaching programs, masterminds or communities that have been valuable for you or any type of investment really that you feel like actually has made a difference?

Donna Shannon:

So we have, our website is built on a learning management system, an LMS, which gives us a platform and it's called Kajabi, K-A-J-A-B-I, Kajabi. I think I spelled that right. What's great about it is it's got built-in coaching programs. Also, our new community that we're going to be launching, it's inclusive within the website. So everything that I need is right there, including my email marketing, my ability to do webinars, all my sales pages. It's great to have everything in one place like that. That being said, it's not an end-all thing. I have a separate system for our CRM program and our writing project management because because Kajabi couldn't do that for us. 17 hats is what we've invested in there, which was not too expensive, but it took some lifting on the front end to get it set up right, especially with the automations. 17 hats, I haven't heard of that before.

Rexhen Doda:

So what we do is we use a system called Go High Level, which has been helpful for us because it does what Kajabi can do, but it also has quite a lot of automations in it, does the CRM. It's kind of like an all-in-one. Maybe it's similar to 17 hats. I'm not really sure. It has been very useful to us. And is this like, when it comes to investment, is this the only thing you feel like has been very valuable or is there any other investment? Maybe not recently, but maybe in the early years, I'm not sure. What would be like a very impactful investment?

Donna Shannon:

So earlier on, like 10, 15 years ago, hard to say exactly how long it's been now, we did hire a reputation management company. It's not so much of a big marketing strategy now as it was back then, but the whole point with reputation marketing would be like, oh, let's grow your Google reviews. Back then it was like, grow your Yelp so that you're building credibility in platforms that people can easily recognize. And we're still seeing traction from that today. I had a consultation with a potential client this morning who found us on Google because of all of our five-star reviews. We popped up first in the listings. So investing, even if you're not hiring a reputation management company, but putting that strategy into play is a great way to drive traffic. You

Rexhen Doda:

can cut of build either a strategy or system to help you consistently with referrals

Donna Shannon:

so we're just launching in the past couple of months our automated service within this because for years we tried to do it in a very very manual way which was painful for everyone i'm not always the most tech savvy person let me just put it that way so it's like oh i'd have to cross-reference this part of my crm to see who referred you and it's like oh but we don't do like the thank you gift until they purchase and then like if we didn't they oh the person wanted us to give that gift as a discount to the first person is all it was really a mess so now we have a streamlined system that's way more automated and we're really starting to see even better return from it

Rexhen Doda:

and is that in a way incorporated with 17 hats or jobby or is it completely outside of that

Donna Shannon:

it's actually outside of that the one we're using is called referral factory pretty easy to set up and you could get into referral platforms that will cost you like 500 a month it's like yes it's wonderful that you do all these amazing things but i'm not gonna invest in that.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah. And when it comes to just the tool, right? Is there something that you wish you had known when you first started selling your coaching business that was like an unexpected lesson learned?

Donna Shannon:

One of the big things was with hiring additional staff and we use them as contractors, right? Which is very common in the industry, especially with writers and coaches. I had to change my whole contract I had with my staff writers, one person who all of a sudden would be like, people were reaching back out to her and saying, hey, I need to get a bit of my resume done. Can you help me out with that? And she would email back to them going, you know what? Why don't you come over to my website because my rates are cheaper than personal touch career services and I'll take care of you. I'm like, oh my God. She was poaching my clients. And here's the thing. She was doing it directly in our own email system. So I had to add a clause into our contract of don't steal our clients. You know, don't sell them additional services without our permission. And then I'm like, you're using Yeah, you gotta build that into the system as like a lesson learned in a

Rexhen Doda:

way. That is so strange. Sometimes it goes without saying, but I guess you have to put on the contract for some other people that might feel like that is okay.

Donna Shannon:

How would you think that that's okay?

Rexhen Doda:

Actually, in a way, it's also a little bit funny in its own way. There's some humor in it. It did some damage there. What are some of the biggest challenges right now that you're facing in you scaling further in your coaching business? And get an answer to that. I want to know if scaling is the thing you're going after. Are you more like staying at this level? Or there's a point on your business that you want to go what is that one thing that is stopping you that if you were to optimize that then everything else would kind of like get you to the point that you want to be

Donna Shannon:

kind of going into this does go really hand in hand with the challenges issues too scalability can always be a challenge right especially i know for years we would have growth point where we could do manual project management for writers and coaches at five six now not so much and we're talking about a difference from working with 30 clients a month up to 50 clients a month there has to be some sort of system in there to make it more seamless, not only for me as sales leadership, but also for the client experience and for the writers to know where they are in their projects. So number one, making sure you have some automation, clear procedures, people are trained on the procedure, makes a big difference. Then of course, I think just in general, the challenges we're seeing as coaches is staying on top of all the AI evolution. Like for example, LinkedIn is now offering a a virtual AI coach. Google, I believe, was playing around with another AI career coach. That's very, very beta testing. I saw that article come through in one of my professional associations, so I played with it a little bit myself. And it's like, okay, how can we use these tools to benefit us, but would not let it steal too much of our business?

Rexhen Doda:

I'm paranoid. I mean, it is no longer like a new thing. Like AI obviously is something that is so new And the goal is actually to like kind of assist not to steal the job, but the technology is going so fast and it's so unpredictable at this point. I wasn't actually aware of LinkedIn one. So I'll take a look at that one. Is there any final advice you'd give to other queer coaches who are looking to scale their impact?

Donna Shannon:

I think one of the things is make sure you're on point with your brand and what you have to offer people. So we didn't talk very much about my standup comedy thing. I do stand up comedy. Yes. I have goals of like, would love to do more clubs do more shows you know things like this of course when people contact me specifically they want to talk about the stand-up comedy thing it's the hook in there one thing's for sure and this goes way way back into the first classes i was teaching in 2004 yeah i would always get the feedback from the students from our clients that i take a boring topic and i make it more fun and interesting so that it sticks with them and they're able to apply it better part of that is like i had a potential client i turned away the business because he was not getting who i was or what we offer to the point where he's like insisting that he's spoken references for me from like past clients and then he's like all your references said you're kind and compassionate i'm like dude what no that's not our brand that's not what we're about okay i can be compassionate but i'm also kind of a hard ass you know i'm very much let's drive your number drive your results put into place solid strategies i'm not the person is going to be tapping you on the shoulder and go, here, here, let's have a cry. I understand you're hurting right now. I'm not that kind of a coach. And the more clear I am about my brand and what people are tapping into here, the more successful we'll be in those coaching relationships.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you so much, Donna. It's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast. For anyone who wants to connect with you or find you, they can find you on your LinkedIn, Donna Shannon. They could also find you on your website, which is personal touch career That's

Donna Shannon:

it for this

Davis Nguyen:

episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe to YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This conversation was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to seven and eight figures without burning out. To learn more about Purple Circle, our community, and how we can help you grow your business, visit joinpurplecircle.com.