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“I’ve been finding people jobs since 1973, and have helped thousands of candidates find great career opportunities. Let me help you too!”... Tony Beshara

"I've been finding people jobs since 1973, and have helped thousands of candidates find great career opportunities. Let me help you too!"... Tony Beshara

Job Search Solution Blog by Tony Beshara2023-06-12T09:52:10-05:00

….luck

In all the years of doing this, I’m absolutely certain that luck plays a role in the difference between finding a job, a really good job and finding just a job. Problem is that I can’t tell you what percentage of each job search is luck and how much of it is skill. It is certainly not luck, for instance, when you work real hard to get an interview with a particular company, but when the person doing the interviewing went to the same college you did and you have some people in common, that’s lucky. It certainly isn’t just luck when you get laid off and then decide to take a trip to visit your family and on the airplane sit next to an executive with the company who agrees to interview you for an opening that just came up for someone with exactly your skills.

Going to work for a company right before it hits its stride and moves up into the big time is just plain lucky. Working with people who move on in their career and call you three or four years later to join them is a bit of luck. I mentioned in the Ted talk that I gave about how people who really love their jobs reframe stories of the things that happened to them during their lives with stories of good luck. And most often those things that don’t begin to look like good fortune turned out to be just that.

 

I’m really not sure if I’ll ever quite understand. It may not be understandable. I’m well aware of the clichés that are written about luck… “The harder you work the luckier you get”…”When it comes to luck, you make your own”…”Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause-and-effect.” Well, these can go on and on. But the truth is there are happenings in all of our lives, especially our job searches, that are just plain lucky.

 

The overall important thing is to be prepared for “luck.” We need to be ready to execute at our best when we get “lucky.” Luck, more often than not, becomes a disaster if we aren’t prepared when the lucky time comes. So, being prepared, being ready to perform, is absolute.

 

The second thing I noticed about luck is that the opportunity for it has to be repeated more and more and more and more often. An individual simply has to show up more often than other people do in order to get lucky. If they are prepared, they’ll know what to do when they get there. Lucky people show up a lot, work their butts off and totally ignore “striking out.” They just keep trying again.

 

Lucky people act and expect to be lucky and they are.

 

 

By |October 27, 2017|Job Search Blog|

….good for joseph

I have known Joseph for more than 20 years. He is a software sales guy and, looking back, I placed him twice in the 20 year period. Being in the software business and being 63 years old, he’s had a really hard time finding a job in software. Unfortunately (nobody admits this) the hiring authorities mostly choose younger kids. But I got to give Joseph credit for the years of determination. There is no doubt that he has been a great sales guy for some really great companies. But the past few years have been tough.

So, Joseph calls me up a week or two ago and says, “Tony, a number of years ago, I very successfully sold staff augmentation services. I was really good at it. Call a number of those people and tell them all go to work for a $45,000 or $50,000 base salary plus commission. I know it’ll probably be a far cry from the $220,000 earnings that I’ve had before in software, but I need a job and over time I can take that kind of money selling IT staffing.”

So, I went to work. I called 10 IT staffing firms that I’ve done business with before. I was pretty blunt with them about the deal Joseph was willing to make with them. It’s really interesting, that profession is predominantly represented by millennial’s with a few gen Y’s. After nine rather polite “no’s” one outfit thought it might be a great idea.

Joseph’s energy, determination, passion and commitment came through. The company hired him at $70,000 salary plus commission. They are thrilled and I guarantee you Joseph is going to be a tremendous addition to their sales organization.

I was blessed to have made four placements this week. One of them, I had been working on for two months which had died and come back life at least three different times. But none of them were as gratifying as Joseph’s getting that job. In fact I don’t think any of the placements I’ve made in the last number of months have been as gratifying as Joseph’s success.

There are literally hundreds of software and high tech sales guys who I have literally “grown up” with over the years. The majority of them are between Joseph’s age and older. The vast majority of them are complaining all the time about how their age is “against” them. It doesn’t do one damn bit a good and it gets them absolutely nowhere. There’s a great deal of them that have been unemployed for more than a year, some more than two years.

Joseph should make us all proud. He’s a really good guy. He makes a great presentation of himself, is personable and people like buying from him. I have to admit that it was his idea for me to call the staffing firms. It did take 10 of them before I found one that would listen. They got a great employee who will make them a lot of money.

If everyone Joseph’s age who can’t find a job thinking it’s because of their age, took Joseph’s attitude and approach, I wouldn’t get the complaints I do.

Good job Joseph!

 

 

By |October 20, 2017|Job Search Blog|

…..Why so many people are out of work… and don’t really want to

There are 325 million people in the United States. 95 million of them are not in the labor force. 88 million of these people don’t want a job…38 million of these say they are retired, 16 million are ill or disabled, 16 million say they are students, 18 million have simply dropped out of the work force. The number of officially unemployed people who say they’re actually looking for a job is 7.1 million. Consider:

  • There are more welfare recipients and full-time workers in the United States
  • One in seven people in the United States receive food stamps
  • One in 20 Americans receive disability
  • 12% of all prime aged men (25 years old to 54 years old) are not looking for a job
  • Between 2000 and late 2007 per capita GDP growth averaged less than 1.5% per year
  • The adult work rate in America is barely above at its lowest level in 30 years
  • For every 1 male between the ages of 25 and 54 working there are 3 that are not

And some of the most prominent reasons for this malaise:

Entitlements pay more than the job. Between unemployment insurance, disability insurance and food stamps, it’s more economical to collect entitlements than it is to find a job. One study reported that a family of four, collecting all the benefits for which they are entitled could earn his much is $65,000 per annum. There are more people participating in at least one of the 15 food programs offered by the Department of Agriculture and there are fully employed in the United States.

The affordable care act has a perverse twist affecting the labor market. Means tested subsidies phase out as incomes rise. Some people will choose to stay poor or accept a lesser job and they might be capable of or get out of the workforce completely to keep insurance. Changes to the affordable care act that President Trump has recently made may, thankfully, change this.

There’s also an “attitude” of entitlement that there “ought to be a job for anyone who wants one and they are to be easy to get.” This attitude causes people to think that the job should come to them. Most people think that “looking for a job” is simply emailing resumes. Most people don’t really work very hard at getting a job.

People don’t want to take a pay cut. Salaries have still never reached levels that they were in 2007 and 2008. Most people have an idea that their earnings should increase every year. Even after long stints of unemployment these people will claim, “I really don’t want to take a step back moneywise.” Once they pass up one or two opportunities, they rarely come to their senses. Instead of taking any good salary they can get a think, “well I passed up to opportunities with less money than I was making so I should stick to my guns and wait for something better.” And something better doesn’t come along for even years.

People don’t like a company’s reputation. Many surveys find that Americans would not take a job with a company that had a bad reputation even if they were unemployed. This is crazy! These same people state that they would change their mind if they receive a 50% plus increase in their previous pay. (It appears that a bad reputation is relative to the money that people are getting paid…go figure!)

I’m not sure I really know what a “bad reputation” means. Unless a firm operates in illegal or immoral business job with the company who has less than a stellar “reputation” is better than no job. And some of these reputations are interpreted from comments made on Glassdoor. It’s despicable that people would believe what might be written anonymously. I don’t have a problem with anything anybody might say about any company as long as they put their name on it. But for people to make decisions about anonymous comments is absurd.

Those in motion tend to stay in motion. Those at rest tend to stay at rest. The longer people go out of work the easier it is to stay out of work. It’s just that simple. This is one of the reasons that taking “massive action” to get a job is so important.

Most people submit resumes online and when they don’t get an answer they give up. These people don’t really know what to do to get a job. The odds of getting a job by sending a resume are 1 in 375 to 400. When you ask people what they’re doing to get a job beyond sending a resume their description is very sketchy. The key is to develop a systematic approach to finding a job. It takes a lot of work! A whole lot of work!

Even when their resume might be perfect for the job, the people who receive it, most of the time, the human resources department is understaffed and overwhelmed. There are 200 resumes submitted for every job and I venture to guess that less than half of them even get scanned let alone read.

The cost of childcare is staggering. In some states cost of childcare is the greatest expense that a family experiences, outweighing food and housing. The largest demographic hit is single mothers. The national Institute of health says that for low income single mothers with young children, child care challenges can be is significant barrier to employment.

The commute is too long. In a recent poll 75% of 584 people said they turned down a job because it was “too long of a commute.”

Maintaining their place in the benefits system is a full-time job. Government benefit programs have strict rules about those receiving benefits. Many people spend the majority of their time staying within those parameters. They know that if the rules are broken they could lose their aid. Government offices are packed every day all day long in this country. The Department of Labor, the Social Security Administration, admission offices for public hospitals in most programs like this have hours upon hours of wait time. The required appointments and the filling out of paperwork, qualifying and requalifying for unemployment, Social Security insurance, disability, food assistance programs are absolutely daunting. It’s very hard to look for a job when a person is faced with these issues. There’s really not enough time in the day.

People out of work for a long period of time feel stigmatized. If a candidate has been out of work for six months or more, they feel marginalized. The truth is, they are. Employers will often pass any candidate up who has been out of work for a long period of time. There are just too many other candidates to choose from. A candidate out of work that long appears to be a risk. And that is just one less risk they might have to deal with in considering another candidate who appears to be either employed or recently unemployed.

 

There are very few simple answers to all of the reasons that so many people are out of work. Repealing or even streamlining entitlements would be a great start. Teaching people all of the activities that it takes to find a job would be another step in the right direction. Holding people accountable for taking massive action with those activities would be another valuable tool. Many of these solutions will be difficult and take a long time to institute.

By |October 13, 2017|Job Search Blog|

…the (almost) $155,000 mistake

i got an interview for one of my candidates that i have known for a number of years…he is very picky and the kind of job he needs is very hard to find..

when i told him about the interiew, he started giving me this stuff about..”well, i know them…i wouldn’t work there…they know me…i don’t want to go…i don’t think they can afford me..it doesn’t sound right” blah..blah..blah…

i threatened him that if he didn’t go, i wouldn’t get him any more interviews…i shared with him that he is a pain in the butt and that he needs to go on any interview he can, because he is hard to place and kind of people that would hire him are very hard to find…

he went…

he starts work for these guys monday…$155,000 salary plus commission that will put him at $300,000 the first year… a $20,000 HIGHER base than he was making..

LESSON: ..go on every interview you can get…you really don’t know “them” like you think you do…what a job “sounds” like has nothing to do with reality… don’t make a $155,000 mistake

By |September 22, 2017|Job Search Blog|

…optimism bias

This is the psychological term and condition that causes a person to believe that they are at less of a risk of experiencing a bad outcome than most, and more likely to believe that they are luckier than most to have a positive outcome. This bias shows up in all kinds of issues. For instance, most smokers believe they are a lot less likely to get cancer from smoking than other smokers. The vast majority of drivers think that they are in the top 20% of quality drivers. Most people think they’re less likely to be crime victims than they really are.

This is relevant to job seekers because 90%  of the job seekers I have interviewed since 1973…over 26,000 of them…and 60% of them were employed…all thought it was gonna be a lot easier to find a job than it was and is… and all began their job search thinking and saying, “This is gonna be easy…never had a problem before…everyone needs a great employee like me…look at all of the promotions I have had…look how great my track record has been…my neighbor (cousin, brother, etc.) got a job real easily, and he is a jerk, so this will be easy…” then they often follow it up with, “…so I took a few weeks…months…off  ’cause I hadn’t had a real vacation in a while…”

Then they start looking for a job or doing some minor efforts toward that and find out that the market is very difficult, more difficult than they even imagined. Reality sets in and they realized that they should have started a full-court press in looking for a job two or three months earlier.

Another form of this optimism bias has to do with people’s attitude towards interviewing. I hear   this a number of times every week, “Tony, just get me in front of them, I’ll nail the interview… I’m really good at it.” Anytime a candidate tells me that, I’m worried. Interviewing is a difficult thing to do. Very few people do it well naturally without a lot of practice. After a few big time rejections, humility and reality normally set in.

Optimism bias in the job search can manifest itself in many other ways and all of them are treacherous to the job seeker. The best way to avoid optimism bias is to approach looking for a job with absolutely no expectations, a slight bit of paranoia and the realization that it is going to be hard and the job seeker has to start working at their job search immediately. I’ve seen six recessions come and go and I assure you the job market is never quite the same every time. A job seeker can’t confuse the last time he or she changed jobs with today’s market.

Rather than being “optimistic,” I suggest a job seeker should be “hopeful” and then work like hell by working a systematic process like I teach.

By |September 17, 2017|Job Search Blog|

….making a job offer…for employers

(This is an excerpt from one of our books 100,000 Successful Hires written, primarily for employers. But if you’re a job seeker, it certainly doesn’t hurt to know the best way for a job offer to be made.)

You would think that the event of making a job offer to a prospective candidate would be an easy, logical one. In fact, it might be a surprise to even think that we would have to address the whole idea. Wrong! Fact is that the actual process of making an offer, once a final candidate has been identified, can be one of the strangest, goofiest parts of the hiring process. One would think it should be the simplest part of the process, but it can mess up a smooth running process very easily.

The final step in the hiring process is making an offer. It can be traumatic for both candidate and employer. This is the time for people to make commitments. Up to this point, every interaction between candidate and employer is speculative. There is minimal risk on each person’s part. True, there has been a lot of effort on the part of both candidate and employer to interview each other, but there’s no commitment, therefore no risk, until an offer is made.

There is a final twinge of fear on the part of the employer and candidate when making an offer. Employers often become alarmingly fearful that their offer will be rejected, that the candidate they’ve courted for weeks and who was interviewed by everyone they could think of will refuse their offer. The candidate who has been trying to get an offer, but also evaluating as best he or she can the firm they are interviewing with, gets scared. They fear that they won’t get an offer and, if they do, they’re anxious about what it might be. This step in the process is difficult for everyone.

The offer step in the hiring process should be a simple and natural progression of the interviewing process, yet it gets confusing when people either lose sight of its importance or overreact to it. In fact, if the interviewing process is done correctly, the offer step should be easy.

The most successful hiring authorities have a pre-offer conversation with a candidate. This can be a face-to-face meeting or a telephone conversation. The hiring authority explains to the candidate that he or she would like to discuss what an offer would look like and also any details about the job that haven’t been discussed in the interviewing process.

If the hiring authority hasn’t done it already throughout the interviewing process, this is the time that he or she should be selling the candidate on the job and the opportunity. This conversation is the candidate’s opportunity to ask any questions he or she might have, but it also provides an opportunity to the hiring authority to find out the answers to any questions he or she may not have answered. It should be a friendly, calm, and open conversation.

In this conversation, the best hiring authorities get a real good indication as to whether or not the candidate will accept the job. In fact, the best hiring authorities actually qualify the candidate in this conversation. They discuss every aspect of the job offer. They answer all the candidate’s questions. Then, they simply ask the hard question of the candidate, “I’m ready to get together for a formal meeting to offer you the job. Can you see any reason that you wouldn’t accept it?”
If for some reason the candidate hesitates or gives noncommittal answers like “Well, when I see the offer in writing, I’ll know better,” or “I’d have to think about it,” or anything that isn’t a positive like “I would accept it,” then the best hiring authorities may rethink making the offer. If they get these kinds of answers, they simply ask a candidate what they’re thinking or what might stand in the way in order to find out why they are hesitant. It never hurts to be blunt and ask, “Why are you hesitating? I don’t want to make an offer unless I know it’s going to be accepted.”
It’s hard to give a blanket strategy for all things that can come up at this point of the process. The best hiring authorities are prepared for just about anything and they always have the salvation of backup candidates. They always have several other people in the queue in case their #1 candidate falters.
The formal offer

If the conversation goes well, the best hiring authorities meet with candidates as soon as possible. They know that any candidate they might want will be wanted by others. Most importantly, the longer they put off this meeting after the above conversation the more indecisive they appear.
We can’t tell you the number of opportunities to hire a good candidate that have been lost because the hiring authority felt the job offer was simply a formality and the candidate was going to accept the job and postpone the formal meeting because regular business got in the way. They assumed a done deal, prolonged the time to formally meet, made it appear that the meeting wasn’t all that important, and lost the candidate. (We once had a hiring authority who postponed the offer meeting for two weeks so she could go on vacation. Lots of love, huh?)

The best hiring authorities have a formal offer written for the candidate. When they meet to discuss the offer in detail, they assume the candidate is going to have lots of questions and have prepared the answers to the questions the candidate had in the pre-offer phone call. The best hiring authorities take as much time in this meeting as they need to and are patient with any questions or discussions the candidate may have. They realize how important this meeting is to both of them.

Discussing a formal offer over the phone is nowhere near as effective as meeting face-to-face. It simply doesn’t have the same emotional camaraderie and the “we care about you” feeling. If a company’s HR department has to issue the offer letter, the best hiring authorities will still meet with the candidate and discuss the offer in detail. The best hiring authorities do not let anyone in the company discuss the offer with the candidate except themselves. They leave nothing to chance.

If everything has been done correctly 75 percent of the time, the best hiring authorities will get the candidate to execute an offer letter and set a start date during this meeting. However, if the candidate asks, “When do I need to let you know?” the best hiring authorities will explain to a candidate that they need to hear from them within 24 hours about their decision. Maybe under extenuating circumstances they may offer a little more time, such as if the candidate is traveling and needs to discuss it with their spouse, but 99 percent of the time the best hiring authorities tell the candidate they need to know within one day.

The best hiring authorities already have a feel for what the candidate is going to do. The best hiring authorities know that a decisive candidate is going to be able to decide quickly. Anything beyond 24 hours usually indicates that the candidate is going to use the offer to leverage another one, and the best hiring authorities don’t seem to tolerate much of this.
If the candidate insists on more than 24-hours, the best hiring authorities explain that they can’t do that, that they have other candidates they are going to pursue. They reinterate that they need to know within 24 hours. If a candidate cannot do that, the best hiring authorities explain to the candidate that they will therefore pursue the next candidate. End of story! The candidate is either in or out. It’s that simple.

By the way, if the formal offer is written after this meeting, the best hiring authorities review it to be sure that it’s consistent with what was discussed. 15 percent of the time, when offer letters are sent after a formal offer discussion, especially when they are written by the HR department in some far-off city, they aren’t the same as what was discussed in the offer meeting. It’s a quick and easy way to lose an excellent candidate

The best hiring authorities set a start date as soon as possible. They know that the further out the start date is from when the offer is accepted, the more things can happen that are adverse to the situation.

The best hiring authorities never assume anything in the offer meetings. If the candidate accepts the job and sets the start date, they simply prepare themselves for that. If the candidate, for some reason, turns the job down or claims that they can’t decide within the 24-hour time limit, the best hiring authorities are gracious and unemotional about it. Getting upset or angry with a candidate who turns the job down is unwise. The best hiring authorities know that they may try to recruit a candidate again somewhere down the line. They know that it pays to always be nice.

No matter what level of position, from the CEO on down, 15 percent of the time a candidate who has accepted an offer is going to call and renege. Sometimes they will do it with grace and style long before the start date. Unfortunately, they sometimes just plain don’t show up with no notice at all. (We agree that’s totally pathetic!)

The best hiring authorities know this kind of thing might happen. One of the ways they prepare themselves for this possibility is to explain to the #2 and maybe the #3 candidates, “We’ve offered the position to another candidate and it’s been accepted. It was a very close decision and you were certainly an extremely good candidate. We did what we thought was best for our organization. The new hire is supposed to start on (date). We expect everything to go well, but if, for some reason, something happens that he or she does not start, I’d like to give you a call. If we might still be a consideration for you, we can pick up the conversation again, if we need to.”

The best hiring authorities hope they won’t need this contingency plan. But just in case, they’ve prepared themselves for it. The #2 and #3 candidates may not be available should this happen, but at least a hiring authority may not have to start all over if it does. We can’t tell you the number of phenomenally successful employees we’ve placed who got hired this way.

By |September 9, 2017|Job Search Blog, recruitment|
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