Job Search Blog Archives - Page 31 of 49

…the cost of YOUR vacancy

If you hire people, you need to read this.

If you ever look for a job, you need to read this.

I have discussed more than 23,000 job openings with employers since 1973. I have worked on search assignments from everything from an hourly maintenance person for a third shift manufacturing environment to presidents and CEOs. Most hiring authorities, from the third shift maintenance supervisor to members of the board, feel like they are very good at hiring (when they’re really not) and that it will only take 45 days to fill the lower to medium salary range positions and 90 to 120 days to fill the higher-level positions (the reality is more like 90 to 120 days on the lower to medium salaried positions and 150 to 180 days for the higher positions – totally unrealistic).

Even though every hiring authority starts out with good intentions, the hiring process drags on for way longer than everyone imagines it will. The major reason for this? People are afraid of making a mistake. In spite of what anyone says, most hiring authorities really don’t like hiring. Now very few managers will ever admit that they downright hate hiring and they’ll tell you that it’s “just part of the job,” but in their hearts they don’t like it. Why? Because when people make a poor hiring decision literally everybody knows it and sees it and that manager is being judged based on that poor decision.

Accounting managers are hired because they’re good at managing the accounting function. If they make an accounting mistake, few people may know it and, if it’s caught in time, it can be erased and rectified. An engineering manager is hired to manage the engineering function and the people that are in the department. If an engineering mistake is made even a reasonable amount of quality control can discover it and fix it. A sales manager who is hired to manage sales can even afford to lose a sale and make it up by making more sales.

But when one of these managers makes a bad hire, most everyone in the company can see it and, since it takes forever to get rid of most bad hires the manager is looked upon as a doofus because he or she hired one. And since the mistake of a bad hire can’t be quickly and easily rectified, the “mistake” walks around the company reminding everyone what a doofus the hiring authority was to hire them in the first place.

In all my years of recruiting I don’t think I’ve ever had a company looking to hire a manager and have, as part of its criteria for hiring, “documentable success in hiring excellent and productive subordinates.” And even if they did, it certainly is difficult to get an objective evaluation of a person’s ability to hire. A manager’s ability to recruit, hire and retain good employees should be one of the main considerations in hiring any manager. But it’s not. It is assumed that any manager with subordinates is good at hiring. But they’re not… most of the time.

So, hiring cycles drag on and on and on. What everyone thinks will take 30 to 45 days takes four to six months because people don’t like doing it and, in their hearts, they know they’re not very good at it. Ninety-nine percent of the hiring authorities in the United States have absolutely no idea the cost to their company that a vacancy has over even a short period of time. Numerous studies, especially one at Harvard University, find that the average value of a productive employee is roughly two and a half times their salary rate. For revenue producing employees, the cost of that vacancy is phenomenal.

On top of the fact that when a vacancy occurs, “It couldn’t have come at a worse time… I’m going to have to get people in the department to cover for this person until I find a replacement, and they are going to be pissed… I’m going to have to do the work this person was doing until I find a replacement.” There are a ton of other emotionally charged feelings… and they’re all bad. They perseverate, “We don’t want to make a mistake… We don’t want to make a mistake… We don’t want to make a mistake… We don’t want to make a mistake… I can’t hire now, I have to do my job… I can’t hire now, I have to do my job… I can’t hire now I have to do my job” when the truth is that it is simply easier to postpone hiring and (much easier) to do the day-to-day job. So, hiring drags on.

I have provided a table that we give to our clients to help them realize, on top of everything else, what a vacant position actually cost them. It sobers them up real quickly. Highlight this address and go to:

http://bit.ly/1TtLK06

Put in the salary range of any vacancy you might have and see what it’s really costing you and your company. If you’re looking for a revenue producing candidate, like sales, the formula is even more dramatic.

So, if you’ve been looking for an assistant controller at a $90,000 salary for eight weeks, you have cost your company $34,615.00. If you’ve been looking for an accountant or production manager who left your company four weeks ago at a $50,000 salary, it has cost your company $14,423.00. And, as you know four weeks can go by in a heartbeat.

If you are a candidate, you can use this table to help you get a job. Last week, one of our sales candidates was in the final interview process with one of our clients. He was interviewing with a VP of sales, his boss and the vice president of finance. Each interview was a “one on one.” As he wrapped up each individual interview, he said, “I want to leave you one last thing,” and he handed each one of the interviewing authorities a small piece of paper with the figure of $93,307.00 written on it. As they looked at it, wondering what it was, he calmly stated, “The quota for this territory is $1.2 million and this is the amount you are losing every month by not having me in this job.” He then paused and asked, “When can I go to work?” Guess who got hired?

Well, I’m sure you get the idea. Most hiring managers are so close to the forest they miss the trees. The cost of a vacancy is real and can motivate managers to take action.

By Tony Beshara|2018-07-25T13:15:22-05:00March 12, 2016|Job Search Blog, recruitment|

Prayer and your job search

I happen to be a real big fan of prayer. Fortunately, I grew up learning to do it, maybe not even realizing what a phenomenal impact it had on my life. In spite of my belief in it, I have tried to objectively investigate over the years the effectiveness of prayer on the part of job seekers. Now, I don’t ask every candidate that I’ve ever interviewed if they pray. I’ve got enough of a challenge in trying to listen to them and help them find a job. But when you consider that I’ve interviewed more than 26,000 candidates since 1973 and been successful at placing more than 10,000 of them, you can imagine that I often get into some pretty serious conversations with candidates about some of the things they do to cope with the emotional anxiety of finding a job.

I’ve written before about the fact that looking for a job, next to death of a spouse, death of a child, death of a parent, coupled with divorce is one of the most emotionally challenging things we do. I’ve observed thousands of different ways that people cope with the emotional strain that is caused by the job search.

Maybe it’s because I look for it and am very sensitive to it, but I’ve come to the conclusion, after listening to so many people, that prayer has a significantly positive and uplifting impact on the emotional challenge of finding a job. I am absolutely convinced that it does.

What’s even more interesting is that I have been able to find that there is one certain manner of prayer that seems to be most effective. This will blow your mind, but based on what I’ve listened to from my candidates, it is a fact. There are some people that pray for outcomes. Actually pray that they find a job. But what seems to be most effective is to pray for acceptance of whatever happens in the job search process.

People who pray for outcomes that may not come about don’t get the interview or the job they prayed for, and can have a tendency to become disappointed that “God did not give them what they wanted.” This makes prayer a very difficult, quid pro quo with God. Then, when the outcome isn’t experienced, there’s bound to be disappointment, and maybe disappointment in God.

The people that seem to get the most out of prayer are those people who pray for acceptance of whatever happens. They pray something along the line of, “Dear Lord, grant me thy peace and thy mercy, thy will be done.” They pray to do their best in every job search endeavor. They pray for guidance and help in writing the best resume they can, they pray to get as many interviews as they possibly can and they pray, especially, to perform well on those interviews and pray to perform well for each interview to the next step. They don’t pray so much for a positive outcome of each event as much as they pray that they do the best they can in the process of finding a job and accepting the result for just what it is, whether they get the job or not. If they don’t get the job, they pray for more enlightenment or to learn from their mistakes or to do better the next chance they get.

St. Ignatious of Loyola prayed for what he called “holy indifference”. It is detachment… remaining indifferent to the results…accepting rejection…refusal…and being ignored…accepting being lied to…being forgotten…and all of the other things that wind up happening in a job search.

My wife, Chrissy, calls it ”holy acceptance”. It is accepting what you may not like and can’t control …not getting what you want, but wanting what you get. It is the serenity prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.” Or the prayer of St. Theresa: “May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be!”

One of my teachers, Jim Rhone, used to say, “Don’t pray that life will get easier, pray that you will get better.” This is a perfect prayer for a job search.

Well, I’m sure you get the point. Now, I’m not trying to go from teaching to preaching. I’m not trying to sell you that prayer in a job search or anything else like it is going to revolutionize your endeavor. But I am here to testify that I’ve seen prayer make a phenomenal difference in people’s job search.

By Tony Beshara|2016-03-01T09:53:28-05:00February 27, 2016|communication, Job Search Blog, unemployment policy|

“Take this job and shove it… I ain’t working here no more…”

(Johnny paycheck, circa 1977)Candidate comes to my office this week says, “it felt so good. It felt so very good when I told these guys that they could take their job and stuff it where the sun don’t shine. I explained to them that I’d had enough. I just couldn’t take it any longer. There browbeating and taking advantage of me and all the other employees in the company just had to stop.

“Hell, nobody else in the company had the guts to do it… those weaklings. And while I was telling them to stuff it, I enlighten them as to what they could do to change things so they wouldn’t lose people like me. That they ran a disgraceful company and they should be ashamed of themselves. They just sat there and looked so surprised. Those fat som-bitches acted like they didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. What a joke! It felt so good to tell them I was leaving.”

Well that was eight months ago and our candidate is still looking for a job. He didn’t think he would have any trouble finding a job. He didn’t think about what was that happen when he left like that…the kind of reference he might get. In fact, our candidate didn’t really think at all.

He thought he had a job lined up with a friend at church that had given him a “we’re always hiring at our place just give me a call” comment. In eight months he’s only had three interviews and he didn’t even come close to getting the job. On top of having a difficult time in finding a job, he’s really embarrassed about the way he quit. He says that he knows that the people he told what they could do with their job know that he’s out of work and are really laughing.

Here’s the lesson, the matter how mad or frustrated you get don’t tell people what they can do with their job until you found a new one. Bite your tongue. Calm down and endure. Find a job before you leave this one. You never know how long it’s going to take to find a job. The people that this guy told off don’t really care about why he left. They aren’t going to change the way they do things because of any employee leaving.

Our poor candidate is in a world of hurt and most of it he created for himself.

By Tony Beshara|2016-02-19T22:37:28-05:00February 19, 2016|interviewing, Job Search Blog|

The Stockholm Syndrome and your job…

The Stockholm syndrome, according to Wikipedia “is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with the captors. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.“

Few people want to admit that this syndrome applies to them and their job. At least three or four times a month, I personally, get calls from potential candidates who, upon listening to their story, convince me that they suffer from this syndrome. There are a lot of really goofy companies out there that are run by a lot of goofy people who border on abusing the people that work for them and with them. The abuse ranges from things like taking advantage of people and their willingness to help to verbal and even psychological abuse. Over the years I’ve even known some candidates to tolerate having things thrown at them by their immediate supervisors. (… Don’t laugh, there are still some idiots out there that do things like this and some people are too afraid to look for a job and put up with it.)

At least 50% of the time as these potential candidates tell me why they need to leave where they’re at, they mumbled something along the line of “… I can’t believe that I stayed here and put up with this for as long as I have.” They then proceed to justify their staying in an abusive situation by expressing their “empathy and sympathy and positive feelings toward their captors” even defending why the company and the people that run it do what they do. They just don’t want to admit that they work for idiots and they shall left a long time ago.

Often, these potential candidates have felt that they needed to stay where they were out of loyalty. Often their company is in terrible financial shape and they begin to look for a job way too late. We have to caution them to watch out saying in an interview, “I should’ve seen this coming year or so ago. I mean, the signs were there… I just didn’t want to see them.” A candidate’s business acumen is seriously questioned in a situation like this.

I realize that looking for a job isn’t fun. In fact it’s a job in itself and if you already have a job it’s like having two jobs. No one likes looking for a job. But staying in a work relationship like this is idiotic too. On top of that, it’s very hard to explain to a prospective employer if you stick around that kind of a relationship for very long.

So at the first sign of anything you think you have to rationalize about your employer start thinking about how you’re going to exit. Don’t get caught in the Stockholm syndrome.

By Tony Beshara|2016-01-31T21:43:54-05:00January 31, 2016|Job Search Blog|

… Gratitude, empathy and understanding can get a great employee

I had a gratifying experience this week. Sixteen people e-mailed me to my personal/business e-mail address that they had been the beneficiary of their employers hiring them in spite of their DWI’s, bankruptcies, misdemeanors and, yes, three felonies. They felt compelled to write about how their employers understood about their indiscretions and hired them anyway. They are phenomenally grateful and realize that their being hired was very rare.

Every one of them told me that they had been rejected a phenomenal number of times because of their mistakes. Everyone expressed the idea that they totally understood why they were not being hired. They might have been frustrated by this, but they weren’t mad. Every one of these people took full responsibility for their mistakes. They ended up going to work for people who had empathy, understanding and the willingness to give them a shot. Most of them went to work at jobs that were well below the level they had before. They realize that, in essence, they were starting all over. Both they and the employers that hired them acknowledged that everyone was getting a good “business deal.”

I personally believe that most employers close their minds to the opportunity of hiring folks with things like this in their background. I’ve tried to argue the wisdom of it to people who simply wouldn’t hear it. They claimed it was their company policy or that they would lose their job if other people in the company found out they hired a felon. When we, as a company, represent a candidate with these kinds of challenges in their background, we first evaluate the quality of the candidate and their experience. We will often represent them and simply ask hiring authorities, before they grant the interview about their ability to hire someone with the respective mistake in their background. If we get the statement “I can’t and won’t do that”, we simply stop.

I did hear from three managers of companies. One of them wrote that he appreciated the post and he personally wouldn’t have a problem with hiring somebody with these kinds of blemishes on their background, but his company would never let him do it. He felt stuck, but he had too many other things to worry about. The two other employers said that they were open to hiring people with these kinds of problems. I have no idea what percentage of our post was read by candidates seeking a job or by hiring authorities, or maybe both. But it was gratifying to get these three folks to respond.

Even our firm will draw the line at representing pedophiles or sex offenders. We will pray for them, but we can’t bring ourselves to place them. But there are lots of folks who can be very good employees, despite their past mistakes.

I didn’t expect to get any responses to that post. To get the 16 supportive emails was gratifying. Especially around Christmas time.

By Tony Beshara|2018-07-25T13:16:27-05:00December 11, 2015|Job Search Blog, recruitment|

…DWI’s, bankruptcy, credit problems, misdemeanors and felonies

Not a week goes by that a candidate represented by our firm reveals one of the above just about the time they are going to get a job offer from one of our clients. My sense is that probably 25% to maybe even 30% of professional job candidates have one of these issues in their background. Certainly, nobody really wants to talk about it and most candidates won’t even bring it up until the issue is either discovered by the hiring organization or they offer it up in the final stages of the interviewing process.

Most of the time, these issues stop the offer. Sometimes they can be worked around by the hiring authority and the company, but they are always problems. There are some graceful ways of dealing with them to minimize their impact but every candidate who has a ding like this knows it’s going to be a problem and they are usually scared to death of its impact.

Unfortunately, felonies are almost always insurmountable, especially in professional positions. Only 10 or 12 times in my 43 years of doing this, have I had a company hire a candidate with a felony in their recent past. The empathetic part of me realizes how sad this might be, but the business side of me realizes why companies can’t run that risk. The situations where candidates with felonies have been hired have usually been in sales environments where they potential employee does not handle cash or money. If you’re an accountant with a felony of embezzlement, you need to change professions.

DWI’s and misdemeanors can often be explained and overlooked by some firms, but it is hard. I suggest people get an attorney to find out how, if enough time has elapsed, these records might be removed from a person’s public background. Everybody has an opinion about how long these things stay on a person’s record. Don’t rely on a friend that thinks they know. Find an attorney that deals with these things all the time and find out exactly what to do.

If you aren’t sure of what is on your record, and it’s amazing the number of people who don’t really know of their misdeeds, run a background check on yourself for around $40 (that is the cheapest service) and you can see what most employers will find. Every once in a while we run into a situation of identity theft as well as the wrong identity being checked.

If there are some of these issues in your background, I’d recommend discussing them with the hiring authority if you think you are going to be a finalist for the job opportunity. And be sure that you discuss them before a background check is made on you by the employer.

Now it is very important and I need to emphasize, very important, that when you go to explain these incidences, don’t be angry or try to justify how you were “wronged” or how you had just a little too much to drink, and you got sassy with the policeman so he decided to claim that you were DWI. The best way to deal with these kind of things in your background is to be remorseful, apologetic and have a “how can we work this out?” attitude. Anything less than a remorseful, apologetic attitude simply won’t fly. I’ve seen felons get hired simply because they presented themselves as remorseful and apologetic. One guy I knew even made it a “positive” benefit.

If a company simply can’t work around the issue, be graceful and understanding. There is absolutely no sense in burning the bridge with the company or the people in it.

Bankruptcies are a bit different. Some companies don’t care; others might. We had a banking client that refused to hire one of our candidates because of a previous bankruptcy. They really wanted to hire the candidate but they had just fired an officer for embezzlement. They couldn’t take the chance. We recently placed a banker that did have a bankruptcy in his background, but the bank hired him anyway because they really liked him. Other than financial institutions, most organizations will consider someone with a bankruptcy. But they better be a really good candidate and sell themselves really well.

“Bruised” credit falls in the same category as bankruptcies. Financial organizations will usually have a rough time with it. But especially since the last recession where lots of people had bruised credit, most firms will overlook it provided the candidate is really good.

Whatever the issue, a candidate is going to have to explain it really well. Again, it’s important for the candidate to bring these issues up before the employer discovers it on his own.

By Tony Beshara|2015-12-09T12:45:10-05:00December 6, 2015|job search, Job Search Blog|

… Your first impression

The recent cover article in Psychology Today summarizes the latest research regarding first impressions. This is one of those topics that people are aware of but they hardly ever apply them to the interviewing situation. The article summarized as follows:

We look at a person and immediately a certain impression of his or her character forms itself in us. A glance, a few spoken words are sufficient to tell us a story about a highly complex matter.
People depend on first impressions to assess a person’s extroversion, openness, agreeability and conscientiousness. Studies have shown that the judgments of these characteristics made after knowing someone for a minute are usually as accurate as those made after knowing the same person for years.
First impressions are almost perfectly accurate 30% of the time.
The presence or absence of physical warmth similarly sways first impressions. Psychologists found that subjects holding a cup of hot coffee as opposed to iced coffee rated the person they met as especially warm and generous.
People who sit at a wobbly table or sit on a wobbly chair judge the people they meet as unreliable.
A person’s face at first glance can form a strong impression. For instance thin lips and wrinkles at the corners elicit judgments of distinguished, intelligent and determined. Persons who were baby faced were perceived as physically weak, naïve and submissive, although also honest, kind and warm.
The more a face resembles the viewers face, the more the viewer is predisposed to like it.
A single piece of highly negative information undoes a positive first impression, but it takes a lot more… like doing something heroic… to overcome a negative first impression.
First impressions are most unreliable when there’s a narcissist in the room. Narcissists are just plain hard to read. They make incredibly good first impressions.
Getting to know people over an extended period of time alters first impressions. But for the most part it takes a long “getting to know you” period to alter those impressions.

A study at McGill University as far back as 1965 found that people decide to hire other people based on the impressions they get of the candidate in the first four minutes.

These facts about first impressions have a lot to do with the interviewing situation. For a candidate, they need to know that it is really important to make a good first impression. Dressing appropriately, looking people in the eye, having a firm handshake and all of the things I’ve discussed in previous blogs about first impressions and the first interview apply. Most candidates totally underestimate the impact of that very first impression. They will give it lip service and say things like, “Tony, I know that… but everybody dresses casually for interviews.”

If you’re a hiring or interviewing authority you want to be aware of the pitfalls of first impressions. Get to know candidates over a period of time, preferably in different environments to confirm, deny or alter first impressions.

Realizing the psychologist’s findings you might want to reconsider going on a job interview on wobbly, stiletto heels or interviewing at a noisy Starbucks after buying the interviewer an iced coffee.

By Tony Beshara|2018-07-25T13:16:58-05:00November 22, 2015|interviewing, Job Search Blog, recruitment|

96 million people who can work, but don’t… Walking dogs

Recently the Department of Labor published a report that there were 96 million people in the United States who could work but don’t. Academics, psychologists, economists and all kinds of experts try to figure out why this is happened. From their academic, 500 foot view, They come up with all kinds of theories as to why. Government entitlements… And there are close to 40 different kinds of government assistance programs where people can get money for doing relatively nothing If you are out of work (BTW, there 1840 subsidy programs run by the federal government). Many would say that these programs encourage people not To work. And maybe so.

I’m in the trenches finding people jobs every day and have been since 1973. I’ve placed minimum-wage people all the way to CEOs, Presidents, vice presidents etc…. wages anywhere from $5 an hour (in 1975) to over $1 million. I’ve probably seen just about every situation you can imagine and people looking for a job. I even had some candidates over the years commit suicide, partly because they were having such a difficult time finding a job.

I submit to you that there is one major reason 99 million people give up and one minor reason. The first reason, is emotional. Most of these people gradually… very gradually.. give up looking for a job because it’s darn hard to do and they don’t get very much success doing it. They get laid off or lose their job they go on unemployment. Maybe they try to get a few interviews. They spend all kinds of time sending their resume over the Internet to job postings that may or may not really exist. They go on a few interviews and because they don’t perform very well and because the competition is phenomenal, they don’t get hired. Maybe they get offered a job at less salary than they were making before, or the job “just isn’t the right fit,” When they send a resume they rarely even get a response. They go to support groups, at least in the beginning of their search along with hordes of other people who are out of work and those are the stories they hear.

They decide that, since they are on unemployment for a while, the house needs fixing up so they do that. They convince themselves that they hadn’t had a vacation in a number of years and since they are out of work, this should be a great time to do it. They hadn’t been back home, to visit their home town in years, so it’s a good time to go visit family and old friends. They begin to do anything and everything that doesn’t have anything to do with trying to find a job. The inertia sets in.

Emotionally, after a few rejections, they become more disheartened. They read the papers about how even though unemployment is somewhere around 5.3% this country has the lowest labor participation rate since 1978. For many of these people their skills are becoming outmoded and after being told that in a number of interviews, They begin to say “there just aren’t any jobs out there,” and they begin to believe it. Even what little the phone was ringing before, it pretty much stops now. They may get a call from a few friends who talk to them about jobs at substantially less money than what they were making before and they defensively think, “if I was worth $xxxxx before, there’s no reason for me to take less now. And they don’t even interview.

By now, seven or eight months have gone by and they still don’t have a job. They may mount a new effort to get interviews. When they send their resume screening and interviewing authorities see that they have been out of work for more than six months and wonder “what’s wrong with this guy?” And now the interviews are even more seldom. If he gets an interview, he has to explain why he’s been out of work for seven or eight months and, no matter what he says interviewing and hiring authorities are suspect of them. After all they have other candidates available to them that aren’t carrying this risk. Employed employers think, “well, if this guy such a good employee why is it taking them so long to get a job?”

By the time 12 months runs around our erstwhile job seeker is absolutely convinced that there are no jobs out there and that he’ll never find one. And his prophecy becomes reality. He is so emotionally debilitated and often, downright depressed, he couldn’t perform well on an interview even if he got one. If one comes along he rationalizes that it’s too far to go to work, not enough money, not the kind of firm that he would like, etc. So he turns the interview down and the spiral continues.

The minor reason that people have problems finding a job is that they just don’t know what to do. They don’t know to develop a systematic approach to looking for a job. A systematic approach that involves making boatloads of calls, trying to get as many interviews as possible, then performing well on those interviews and doing this over and over and over and over again until they find a job.

Last week one of our placement managers was called by one of our clients. The client needed to hire a quasi-accountant for his firm on the temp to perm basis. The client wanted to pay $13 an hour with the understanding that the position may become permanent after the first of the year. Our recruiter called a guy who fit the description really well who had been out of work for 18 months. the guy had been in the zone business for a number of years making $45,000 and he had done a lot of accounting and bookkeeping to manage his own business. He closed the business 18 months ago and has been doing odd jobs since. We described the opportunity to him thinking that he be phenomenally excited and go on the interview. At the initial phone call candidate listen to what we had to say and asked if he could call us back. He called back 15 minutes later and said that he wasn’t going to go on the interview. It sounded good but it was only temp to perm, it was too far away to drive and on top of that he could make $1500 a month walking dogs. If he took a job like that he wouldn’t be able to walk dogs. He was mentally and emotionally unemployed and so emotionally unemployed that it was simply easier to rationalize not going to work because he needed to walk dogs.

This is why 66 million people are permanently out of work. Kind of sad.

By Tony Beshara|2015-10-19T09:58:38-05:00October 18, 2015|Job Search Blog|

“We Just made a mistake in hiring the last person and we don’t want to make another one”…”

When a job seeker hears this from a prospective employer, he or she had better be prepared for an arduous interviewing process. In fact, this kind of situation where a company has started to replace what they consider to be a big hiring mistake is the hardest interviewing environment that a job seeker can experience.

Hiring authorities are so afraid of making another hiring mistake, they start operating from fear of loss rather than vision of gain. They are so obsessed with the fact that they made a mistake, they start thinking of ways they (think) will keep them from making another one. The first mistake they make is they keep telling themselves, and candidates, “We don’t want to make a mistake… We don’t want to make a mistake… We don’t want to make a mistake…” It becomes a mantra that they keep saying over and over before every interview and before every conversation about hiring a new person. The second thing they do is to contrive more “steps” in the interviewing process, thinking that if more people interviewed the candidates they wouldn’t make a mistake. The truth is that more people involved in the interviewing process does not decrease the probability of making a poor hire. In fact, having more than three people involved in the interviewing and hiring process increases the odds of hiring a “safe” candidate but not necessarily a better one.

Recently we had a client get 16 people involved in the interviewing process for a major accounts salesperson. They had made such a disastrous mistake in hiring the last person, they figured if 16 people were involved in the interviewing process, they wouldn’t make another mistake. There are very few candidates that will be liked by 16 people, especially if the previous employee was a big mistake. I have now been interviewing for three months, primarily because the logistics of getting 16 people to interview one candidate is a nightmare. Nobody in the organization has guts enough to say, “This is stupid. We’re never going to get anybody hired this way.” Another client we have recently worked with… a $250 million company… has the CEO do a final interview with everyone the company is going to hire. They were applying this idea to inside sales/business development people (even after six interviews). The CEO travels worldwide and he’s gone a lot. In the last six weeks they have lost hiring three really good candidates because the CEO simply isn’t around to speak with the candidates, even by Skype, and the candidates have moved on to other opportunities. They had made two recent mistakes in hiring business development reps and they figure this is the way to keep it from happening again.

Another strategy companies have after they’ve made a disastrous hiring mistake is to “hire” third-party consultants to interview the candidates or come up with a battery of tests and assessments for the candidates to take. At least that way, if they make a hiring mistake, they can blame someone else instead of themselves or say, “Well, she did really well on the tests.”

Enduring this process can be a nightmare for a candidate. First of all, the candidate needs to be damn near perfect. Since there are very few “perfect” candidates, most candidates that are well-qualified and should be considered get eliminated. When a candidate knows that they are being interviewed for a position recently vacated by a “hiring mistake” he or she should expect a difficult process. Whatever risk factors the candidate may have will be accentuated and magnified at least 10 times. Getting frustrated over this will not do any good.

So, if you’re a job seeker and you’re pursuing a job vacated by a “mistake,” be prepared. The proctology exam will be long and painful.

By Tony Beshara|2018-07-25T13:17:44-05:00September 20, 2015|Job Search Blog, recruitment|

Ned: “I just made a mistake in the job I have now and I don’t want to make a mistake again.”

So, we get Ned an excellent interview. We warned him when we interviewed him that he was focusing so much on “not making a mistake” and that he wasn’t selling himself in the right way. He kept going over and over and over the fact that he had made a mistake and he didn’t want to make a mistake again. We totally understand Ned’s situation. When anyone makes any kind of mistake, especially in taking a job, they don’t want to make another one.

Unfortunately, Ned went into the hiring authority and, according to the hiring authority, “he interviewed me. He had a whole list of 15 or 20 questions that he asked me before I got a chance to even interview him. Apparently, he made a mistake in his last job and he is so worried about making a mistake again, he interviewed me. I’m not interested in him.”

The lesson here is real simple. No matter how much of a mistake you made in the last job decision you made, you have to focus on interviewing well for the next job. You have to sell your features, advantages and benefits to the prospective employer. If you sell yourself well enough, the organization will give you every reason in the world that you should… or shouldn’t… go to work there.

Ned got so wrapped up in protecting himself that he didn’t interview well. What’s even worse is that when we mentioned this to him in a follow-up conversation after we spoke to the employer, he further justified the way he approached it by saying that, “he just couldn’t afford to make a mistake again.”

Ned isn’t going to get hired by anyone if he keeps approaching interviews in this manner.

By Tony Beshara|2015-09-13T21:30:20-05:00September 13, 2015|Job Search Blog|