Oh my, the little comments candidates make can cost them a great opportunity. Just this last week a late 30 something-year-old candidate of our firm lost a really great opportunity because, during the conversation with the hiring authority he mentioned that someday, “he’d like to own his own business.” The company decided not to hire him because they were afraid that after a couple years there he would leave and start his own business. When we checked back with the candidate he laughed and said that he didn’t have in mind owning his own business until his kids were out of college and his oldest was only 10 years old. We asked him why he didn’t explain that to the hiring authority and his comment was, “Well he didn’t ask when I would like to own my own business!”
What most job seekers don’t really understand or comprehend very well is that interviewing and hiring authorities make a decision about hiring you based on very little information and then they justify the rest. Interviewing and hiring authorities are especially susceptible to looking for a negative. It’s very hard to get people to understand that even though an organization might be trying to hire you, they are more interested in finding reasons not to hire you as they are reasons to hire you. Hiring or interviewing authorities are more sensitive to negative comments and coming to negative conclusions far more easily than they are to positive comments and positive conclusions. What candidates have to realize is that they have to absolutely prove that they are a good candidate, whereas it’s almost as though hiring and interviewing authorities are assuming the candidate is not qualified and should not be hired before they even start the interview. Employers are not interested in a risky hire. Even getting one or two negative thoughts from a candidate will keep them from hiring that candidate. And, after all, if they don’t hire the candidate, no one will ever know if they were right or wrong.
Candidates have to realize that interviewing and hiring authorities don’t know them. These people are judging the candidate by only the words they say in the interview. In other words they are making a judgment about the candidate’s professional ability to do a job based on, at most, a one hour or two hour interview. In the above situation where the candidate stated he wanted to own his own business, had the people doing the interviewing simply been involved in a “conversation” with the candidate they might have explored the whole idea further and found out what he really meant. This demonstrates how tense and microscopic the interviewing situation is. If interviews were more “conversational” we’d all be a lot better off. But they’re not and every candidate needs to be aware that people will hang on every answer and read into them meanings that may not be there.
In my personal practice, I have at least one candidate a day say something along the line of, “Well, from my point of view..” or “The way I see it…” or “To my way of thinking…” when I confront them about the rather absurd statements they might make. Last week, one of my candidates with only 10 years of experience tried to explain to me that he wasn’t going to answer the question of how much money he was making because, in his mind he was being paid way too low and that if he let a potential employer know that, the potential employer would low ball him with an offer. I tried to explain to him in more ways than one that if he answered the question that way he’d be automatically eliminated. He kept saying, “But from my point of view…” I kept trying to explain that a hiring authority doesn’t care what the candidate’s point of view is; he or she cares about *their* strong point of view. And their point of view is that they have to know what the candidate has been making. I explained to the candidate that if he was going to continue answering that question that way, then he would just need to find another recruiter to work with him because I was wasting his time. The candidate needs to be forever conscious of how the interviewing or hiring authority sees things.
Every candidate that ever interviewed for any position, from a CEO job all the way down the corporation needs to be aware that any statements or answers given that doesn’t clearly state a positive answer will be interpreted negatively! So, no matter how many wonderfully positive answers you think you give it only takes one negative, even quasi-negative statement to blow the interview. In the last two weeks, our firm has had candidates to make these kinds of statements:
• I took the last six months off because I could afford to. (interpretation: I don’t really have to go back to work.)
• I left that job because the people running it were crazy and didn’t know what they were doing.
• I didn’t finish my degree because the degree doesn’t really make any difference.
• I followed my ex-boss to the last two jobs that I have had.
• My leaving the company is a mutual decision.
• I’m not really looking for a job. I just wanted to see what you had.
• Most of the promises my company made to me didn’t come about.
• My husband thinks that my company is taking advantage of me.
• I need to work closer to home.
Well, I could go on and on, but it’s obvious that these candidates were not thinking about how what they were saying could be interpreted. It would be really easy for any candidate to be eliminated for just saying one thing like this. Some or all of these things might be true, but a person just can’t say them in an interview.