Job Search Blog

Edward had a 20 year successful career with a number of different firms… he took a job as a vice president with a company based in Mumbai, India… even brought over a few of his previous employees to work for him…

Early on in the relationship, Edward caught on that his new employer really didn’t have much respect for Americans and Edward’s clearly arrogant attitude didn’t help…

Edward had never really had a problem finding a job and had always been hired by people he knew or was introduced to by people he knew… there is no doubt he was a top performer and never had a problem finding a job… even though he was earning more than $300,000 a year, he got fed up with the friction between himself and his superiors so he quit…

Edward assumed he would have no problem finding a job… he took a month or two off to calm down and started calling all of the contacts that he had…VP jobs are not easy to find, but,  after all he had never had a problem before… Edward was always very picky about the kinds of companies he would interview with and the kind of job that he would accept… after all, he was good…

Edward didn’t get as many interviews in the beginning of his job search as he thought he would… he turned down three over four interviews for positions one step below a vice presidency as well as a few of them because he didn’t feel, after looking at the company’s websites, they were the kind of organization he wanted to belong to… the calls started dwindling and even when they came,  Edward rationalized not following through with interviews because he had already turned down interviews for better positions with better companies… he also became angry and more frustrated at the situation… he had never had this much trouble finding a job…

Almost a year has gone by since Edward has worked… he has spiraled down to a frustrated, angry person… the company was sold to a group of American investors so emotional challenges of working for a foreign company are no longer there…but Edward can’t go back

Edward will eventually find a job… most likely a lot less of a position that he had for less money and hopefully he will rebound well… the lesson is, never let your ego get bigger then your game… never let your ego lead you to make a rash decision like Edward did… just because you found a job easily in the past doesn’t mean you will now or in the future…

Just this past week we had candidates eliminated from being considered for jobs for these reasons:

not bring a résumé with them to the interview
not taking notes during the interview
not having any questions for the hiring authority when asked
being 20 minutes late to the interview… and not apologizing
falling asleep in a waiting room
perfume that you could smell three offices away
a candidate had gained  so much weight he couldn’t button his shirt collar when he put on a tie
the hiring authority thought she detected alcohol on the candidate’s breath
the candidate badmouthed three previous employers
the candidate claimed to be presently employed when he wasn’t
the candidate complained about the parking to the receptionist

I wish I could tell you that I was making this stuff up… we deal with a pretty high level, professional group of candidates and this stuff still happens…

Fortunately, we are a large organization and many of our other candidates did very well…

I sometimes think I know why people have trouble finding a job…

There is so much ‘noise’ out there about how to get a job and so many people saying so many things, it’s hard to separate the right stuff from the junk…

I recently saw a video by a “job search expert” who talked about how important it was for candidates to have a blog and all of the effort it takes to write a blog, etc…

Please remember that the most important… the most important… thing you can do to get a job is to interview well… the second most important thing you can do to get a job is to get the interview… you gotta  pick up the phone, call a hiring authority who has “pain”  i.e. the need to hire somebody… and ask for an interview… then go to the interview and sell yourself…

I interview candidates all the time who spend hours upon hours crafting resumes, developing their personal “brand,” designing their LinkedIn profile, developing “guerrilla tactics” for their job search,  attending seminars and all kinds of other stuff that causes them to confuse activity with productivity…instead of trying to get an interview.

All of this stuff might be OK, but where the rubber meets the road in the job search is to get interviews and perform well on interviews… you gotta pick up the phone and get an interview, then perform well on that interview… these two things are the only things that really matter…

The major reason that people spend so much time on all of these secondary activities in looking for a job is because they can control them and they don’t run the risk of being rejected by doing them… the sooner a job seeker learns that being rejected as part of a successful job search process, the better off they’re going to be..

So, have a nice LinkedIn profile, write a great blog, craft a great resume, but quit doing this stuff instead of trying to get interviews…

Focus on what really matters…

…twice this week, our firm had candidates who got eliminated from contention because of, one a history of DWIs and the other a history of bruised credit… The mistakes the candidates made weren’t so much that they had these in their background but that they didn’t inform interviewing and hiring authorities about them BEFORE they were going to get offers…

The challenge was that both candidates were told that, after a lengthy interviewing process, they were likely to get hired but their background had to be checked… neither candidate told the companies they were speaking to that they were likely to have problems in their background…

When the companies did their background checks and discovered two DWIs for one candidate and bruised credit for the other, they decided to turn each candidate down…

Now, it’s quite possible that neither candidate would’ve been hired because of these problems in their background… but the biggest mistakes the candidates made was NOT telling the hiring authorities that they had these glitches in their background BEFORE their backgrounds were checked… each hiring authority felt that the candidates had not been honest with them… and that feeling overrode the issue that these problems were in the candidates’ past…

If you have any kind of other problems like this that are going to show up in a reference or background check, you absolutely have to tell the hiring authority BEFORE the hiring authority discovers it on his own…

Over the years, we have seen many, many candidates get hired even with felonies in their background primarily because they told the hiring authority BEFORE the background check that they had a problem in their past.

If a candidate waits for the employer to discover these kinds of things without forewarning them, the employer’s trust is violated… and again, they are as upset with not being told as they are with the issue itself… the time to tell an employer that he or she may discover this in your background is when you find out you were a finalist and you are likely to get an offer once the background has been checked…

One of our candidates… the one with the DWIs… had done his own background check on himself and amazingly enough neither one of his DWIs showed up, so he figured there was a good chance that when the company did the background check, they wouldn’t find out about them… he shouldn’t have relied on this chance…

So, the lesson is if you have any kind of glitch in your background, you need to tell the hiring or interviewing authority before they do a background check… if they discover it and feel like you need to have told them, their trust will seem violated and it’s not likely you will get hired…

There is so much junk and bad advice out there about looking for a job, interviewing, etc… I saw a video posted on YouTube where the authority recommended, when negotiating a salary and you were asked what you are presently earning, you should say “well, I’m being compensated fairly but what kind of salary comes with this opportunity?”

The guy who was giving you this advice is supposedly a career counselor with lots of experience… this is some of the worst advice I have ever heard…

If you, as a candidate, are asked a question about what you are presently earning, then answer in some ridiculous “cutesy” way by doing what the author said, “answering a question with a question”…. you are likely to get eliminated…this advice is downright stupid!

If you answer a straightforward question like that with some stupid answer that communicates you obviously don’t want to answer the question, you are  going to do nothing but piss off  the person who asked the question… where any professional “career counselor” got the idea to do this I have no idea…

When you get asked the question of what you are earning or what you have earned in the past, you need to tell the interviewing hiring authority exactly what you’re making and what you have earned in the past… any answer other than that makes you look like a fool and likely gets you eliminated as a candidate…

Any stuff you read or listen to on the Internet regarding looking for a job, interviewing etc. that isn’t written by someone who actually find people jobs, ask yourself, “does this really make sense?”

I found a 1965 study at McGill University that found  hiring authorities made a decision about their hiring or not hiring a candidate in the first four minutes of the interview… That was 1965 and the study was trying to encourage hiring authorities to spend more time interviewing properly…

I contend that inspite of all the literature, coaching, teaching, training and ‘management development to help managers do a better job of interviewing and hiring, the four minute decision is still not far off from reality…

No manager or hiring authority is ever really going to admit to this reality… what this teaches a job seeker in today’s market is that you’d best make a good impression in the first four minutes of an interview… what you say, your body language, etc. sets the tone for the interview…and may decide on your being hired.

interviewing takes practice… most candidates don’t practice enough… interviewing doesn’t come naturally…

So, how would you evaluate the first four minutes of your interviews?

One of the most difficult challenges in a job search… especially in today’s market is maintaining a positive attitude. Unfortunately, the majority of things that happen to job seeker are negative… in fact, my estimate is that there are 15 negative things that happen for every positive.  It is very easy to get what Zig Zigler used to call “stink’en think’en”… Just the emotional strain of having to find a job can put people into a negative spiral.

I suggest that job seekers… or anyone, for that matter… be constantly reading positive, motivational books and listening to positive CD’s… here is a list I recommend…some are old “classics” and some are relatively new… 15 to 30 minutes of this kind of reading every day makes all the difference in the world…

Acers of Diamonds by R. Conwell
As a Man Thinketh by James Allen
Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins
Beyond Strength: Psychological Profiles of Olympic Athletes by Steven Ungerleider & Jacqueline Golding
Blink by Malcom Gladwell
Devotional Classics by Richard J. Foster
In Pursuit of Excellence by Terry Orlick
In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports by Michael Murphy and Rhea A. White
Inner Athlete by Dan Millman
Inward Bound by Alexander Everett
Man’s Search for Meaning by V. Frankl
Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz
Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren
Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith
Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
The Achievement Zone by Dr. Shane Murphy
The Book of 5 Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
The E-Myth by Michael Gerber
The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallowey
The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart
The Job Search Solution Tony Beshara
The Laws of Spirit by Dan Millman
The Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman
The Richest Man in Babylon by G. Clason
Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin
Outliars by Malcom Gladwell
Drive by Daniel Pink
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
Wooden onLeadership John Wooden
Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney
Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly
Great by Choice by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
Willpower Roy Baumeister and John Tierny
Nerve by Taylor Clark
Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow

Spiritual books, like the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, Tao Te Ching, books of prayer, etc., are also essential.

I would recommend “Horatio Alger” type stories, like the story of Helen Keller, Colonel Sanders, or any inspirational stories that talk about lessons people learn by living and succeeding in a terribly “unfair” world. Stories about people overcoming a fear, insurmountable odds to triumph in the end, inspire us all.

RECOMMENDED AUDIO CD’S

Norman Vincent Peal,  Anthony Robbins, Phil McGraw (Dr. Phil),  Dennis Waitley, Brian Tracy,  Zig Ziglar,  Wayne Dyer,  Dan Millman, Steven Covey and Michael Gerber

In www.thejobsearchsolution.com, I provide a guided imagery session that gets tremendous results for the users…I received two emails this week from users who credit the session to not only their interviewing well but actually getting their new jobs…

Their emails reminded me of how important it is for job seekers to envision success throughout the job search…that means running movies in your mind of getting interviews and performing well on those interviews…it also means ‘replaying’ all the negative things that happen…not getting the interview…not doing well on the interview…anything that needs to be ‘replayed’ in a positive way…and done immediately after the unfortunate result…

The majority of things that happen in a job search are NOT positive…there are probably 15 less than positive events for every positive one..face it, looking for a job in today’s market is emotionally and mentally challenging…

A job seeker has to be constantly ‘replaying’ with positive thoughts and ideas…they have to ‘overlay’ all of those unfortunate, negative events.

…lately, I’ve been running into some small issues that could make a big difference in getting interviews … so, pay attention.

Make sure your phone number is on the top of your resume, easily found next to your name and e-mail address…three or four times a day, I get a resume with a phone number of the candidate at the bottom of the resume or the bottom of the first page of the resume…twice last week,  I received resumes with a phone number, name and e-mail address literally written along the side of the resume so you actually had to turn the page horizontally to read the phone number…  be aware that your resume is “scanned” by the reader…  if the reader sees something it likes, you want your phone number to be so accessible they can dial you up immediately… don’t make people search for your important contact information… they’ll simply quit and move on to the next resume if it’s too hard…

Your voicemail… make sure you confirm the number of your cell phone AND your name with your recorded voicemail message… you want to be sure that people know exactly who they are reaching…be sure to record your voicemail message in a quiet place…not while driving…not while in a Starbucks … not only is it unprofessional, but the caller may not call back if they can’t understand exactly who they’ve reached…(by the way, many of us keep resumes for specific types of people for many years… from my own experience, if I call a phone number that is more than two or three years old and I’m not sure the phone number is of the person I’m trying to reach, i.e.  they don’t state their name in the voicemail message,  I may not leave a message and simply hang up…)

Leaving a voicemail… make sure  the voicemails you leave for people you’ve interviewed with are also direct, to the point and short… remember that most hiring authorities  have near full voicemails and they have their finger on the delete button to eliminate as many of them as they can…while hearing your voicemail, they’re focused on either one of the ones previous to yours that is highly important or an important one they are  anticipating… you need to be sure they can remember the message you leave so they can call you back…( for the best script you could use in leaving a voicemail, go to www.thejobsearchsolution.com.)  Also, when  leaving a message be sure to state your call back phone number twice and do it s-l-o-w-l-y so the person listening to it gets a chance to grab a pen and write it down … the reason you state it twice is because, especially from a cell phone, there’s often distortion of one or two of the digits you’re speaking … and it certainly doesn’t hurt to repeat your name twice, once in the beginning of the voice mail and again at the end … again, compensating for distortion

These are little things but they may keep you from getting interviewed.

Evil exists…it is just as mysterious as God’s love…we don’t really quite understand it..we never will

…pray for all departed souls…pray for their families..forgive..pray for the soul of the shooter…

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen.