It’s a process few people genuinely enjoy, but it’s one which we all find ourselves going through periodically in our careers: landing a new job. We grabbed MajorData himself, Albert Bellamy, for a wide-ranging discussion about the ins and outs of that process: LinkedIn invitation etiquette (and, more importantly, effectiveness), how networking is like spousal communication (!), the usefulness of reducing the mental load required of recruiters and hiring managers, and much, much more! You might just want to drop and do twenty push-ups by the end of the episode!

Links to Resources Mentioned in the Show

• (Book) Reverse the Search: How to Turn Job Seeking into Job Shopping by Madeline Mann


• (Podcast) Freakonomics Episode 633 – The Most Powerful People You’ve Never Heard Of


• (Blog Post) Linear Regression vs. XGBoost — Which Predicts Sales Better (Using R)?


• (Presentation) I Solemnly Swear I Am Up to No Good: The Measure Chat (Villain) Origin Story 


• Strava Measure Group  


• (Book) Analytics the Right Way: A Business Leader’s Guide to Putting Data to Productive Use


• (Videos) Data Council ‘25


• MeasureCamp Chicago

Photo by Thriday on Unsplash

Episode Transcript

00:00:05 .75 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. Analytics topics covered conversationally and sometimes with explicit language.

00:00:13 .80 [Michael Helbling]: Hey everybody, welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. This is episode 275. A long time ago, it seemed like all you had to do was put analytics somewhere in your LinkedIn page, and that would kind of ensure a steady stream of recruiters emailing you about job openings. I don’t think that’s been true for quite some time now. And, you know, honestly, today, all too often, people you’d least expect it are showing up with that green open-to-work badge on their LinkedIn profile. And even if you have a job, maybe you’re looking for something else, and it just seems like every place you apply just ghosts you. I mean, the truth is the job search in the data analytics field, it’s changed. And you know, while a lot of the data is anecdotal, the trends certainly feel real. And so how do you do a job search the right way today? I think we should talk about it. Let me introduce my co-host, Tim Wilson. How’s it going?

00:01:10 .83 [Tim Wilson]: It’s going great. I’m ready to learn all the ins and outs of this. Yeah. Your topic. It’s not for me personally. Let’s say.

00:01:19 .78 [Michael Helbling]: Well, that’s the thing is like our job search skills are very antiquated. I would imagine you and me just because of how old and unemployable we are. Speaking of employable, Julie Hoyer. Hey.

00:01:37 .92 [Julie Hoyer]: Hey, can’t wait.

00:01:40 .01 [Michael Helbling]: You’re the next generation. And so I’m glad you’re here. Me too. And I’m Michael Hobley. And we wanted to have a guest, someone who kind of makes their business to understand the ins and outs of the modern job search. Albert Bellamy is the Marine who smiles at spreadsheets. After a distinguished career in the United States Marine Corps, he transitioned into analytics where he’s held roles with intellect and currently works at Altrix. He also coaches people through their career growth and transitions with his company, Major Data. And today he is our guest. Welcome to the show, Albert.

00:02:12 .34 [Albert Bellamy]: Thank you very much. It’s awesome to be here. This has been a bucket list thing for me for a while. Well, you should have reached out. Why did you wait for us to reach out to you? You know, I didn’t want to… It’s a thing. You want to play hard to get.

00:02:26 .37 [Michael Helbling]: I like your style. I like your style. But let’s just start with you need a bigger bucket. And…

00:02:33 .52 [Tim Wilson]: I didn’t say this was the entirety of the list. It’s one on there. Yeah. Or it is a really big bucket. Maybe that’s what it is, right?

00:02:41 .23 [Michael Helbling]: It’s a… Bucket list B. It’s a catch-all. No, it’s great to have you. And honestly, you’re someone I’ve sort of kept track of on LinkedIn for quite some time and sort of seen sort of what you post and things like that where you’re helping people. Question for you maybe just to get us started. What took you down a path because you obviously have a long career in the Marine Corps, but then jumped into analytics as a career after that. Why the additional work helping people with careers and things like that? What was the impetus there?

00:03:14 .24 [Tim Wilson]: Just analytics just doesn’t pay. You had to have a site as well.

00:03:18 .68 [Michael Helbling]: I don’t think you make a ton of money helping people find jobs. I mean, I don’t know. Not yet. Okay. Not yet.

00:03:28 .48 [Albert Bellamy]: Give it time.

00:03:28 .92 [Michael Helbling]: Not more than you make in analytics anyways. I was just curious. This is sort of an intro question for you, I guess.

00:03:34 .75 [Albert Bellamy]: Yeah. The nine to five does still pay the bills. Career coaching is supplemental as of yet. Yeah, it’s kind of antithetical to a military career. I hesitate to call it a long military career. It really wasn’t really that long. So 24 years in the military, most people get out and they kind of leverage that to do something sort of defense adjacent and stay in the industrial complex. I found that was there for me and it was there for me in an analytic space working for contractors. I had a couple of offers and I just felt like it was something I wanted to get away from and sort of really go into the analytic space and totally get away from people leveraging things that I already knew. And yeah, so it was funny because I decided to retire and you have to put in for it, career service member, you have to put in for it several months up to like over a year ahead of time. So I did that. And so I knew I was transitioning out. But I still had this very time-consuming, very overwhelming job. And also, we were leading during COVID, which you can imagine was kind of a nightmare. And so we were there in the office. We were the only people that didn’t ever take a day off during COVID. And so I just had a little time and little snippets, you know, five, 10 minutes here and