Job Search Solution Blog by Tony Beshara

one  great way dealing with the emotional strain of having to look for a job… especially if you are looking for a job full time and don’t have one… is to keep a daily journal recording the activities of the day as well as  your feelings and thoughts about how your day went. You don’t have to be out of work for very long to realize the vast array of emotions you experience even on a daily basis… you can go from feeling great about an interview you’re going to have to feeling lousy when you get a call canceling the interview an hour later… the ups and downs are drastic

By keeping a journal of not just your activities but also  your feelings and thoughts you can begin to objectify as well as release a lot of the emotions that you are experiencing… psychologists have proven that journaling relieves stress..

Journaling is really easy to do especially with today’s technology… I use a ‘speak to text’  software to actually “write” by talking into my computer… your journaling can be done at the end of every day and serve as a summary of the day… your journal entry doesn’t have to be long or short …it just gives you a chance to emote and document your feelings on paper or, in the computer… journaling is a great way to relieve tension and have you feel like you “get it out of your system”… a weekly review of your journal will remind you that lots of positive things happen even during a difficult time… in case you hadn’t noticed,  negative events have a lot more impact than positive events… we have a tendency to focus on the negative ones more than positive ones… it’s simply human nature…be sure to journal about at least one positive thing even if most of what you might write is negative… look back for insights that you might gain from previous entries and track your progress

So get yourself a speak text software and start journaling about your job search… you’d be surprised how the reflections and insights you gain in reviewing your journaling will create a sense of well-being…

Nick is a seasoned professional… 20 years of solid experience and really knows what he’s doing… he also follows instructions and teachings very well too…

Nick had an initial interview with the executive VP on the phone and he detected by the questions that the executive VP was asking and seemed very much of an analytical  guy… and sure enough when Nick did his research he found out that the guy had an undergraduate degree in engineering from MIT and a master’s degree in engineering from Caltech…

So what is next to when he gets into a face-to-face interview with the executive vice president he brings a whole “analytical” presentation of himself complete with charts, graphs and boatloads of numbers proving that he is excellent at what he does… the executive VP told me that he had never, in 25 years of management, had a candidate make as good a presentation of himself as Nick did…

Nick hasn’t gotten hired yet, but he’s well on his way to an offer…

I teach in my courses and in my books the fact that you need to analyze the way the hiring authority “sees” the world and if you can make a presentation to the hiring authority in the manner in which they “see” the world, you’re better off… now it may not always be as clear a situation as Nick ran into, but most candidates never even give any thought to the way the hiring authority “sees” the world… the executive VP came out of engineering but was now in general management… “you can take the boy out of engineering but you can’t take the engineering out of the boy”…Good for Nick!

Linda was an outstanding candidate… solid skills, worked eight years for the premier organization in her field and a fantastic track record… she had been passed over for a promotion and knew she needed to leave…

She was making top dollar and, since she’d been in her profession for eight years, she knew what she wanted and  the landscape of her business…

We got her an interview with one of her competitors that she was very pleased with it… we got her another interview with another firm she claimed to know… she said, “I don’t want to go on that interview… I spoke to two people that know the regional director and he’s absolutely awful to work for… I never run into them in the marketplace… it sounds like they want to pay less than what I’m making now…I’ve been taking too much time out of the office to interview and my management is going to start being suspicious… I just can’t go on the interview.”

We explained, “Linda, you got to go on every interview you get the chance… you don’t know enough about these companies, even if they are a competitor of yours, you don’t know anything about the director, you’ve never met the guy… you have no idea what kind of money they will pay until you sell yourself to them and give them good reasons as to why they ought to hire you!”

After  five minutes of downright arguing , Linda agreed to go… but she said, “I’m only going because I’m afraid if I don’t, you won’t get any more interviews!”

The company had interviewed 17 candidates over the past six months and not found one that came close. After a two-hour interview with four different people, including the CEO Linda got offered the job and accepted… and by the way she got a $10,000 a year base salary increase…also, the director turned out to  be awesome…

Go on every interview you get the opportunity for… you never know what might happen.

One of the attributes of our new Pope, Pope Francis is that of humility… we don’t see a lot of humility in the world today and it made me think how that attribute of is a great lesson for both job seekers as well as hiring authorities…

Often candidates think that when you sell their features and advantages and benefits to a prospective employer they have to be less than humble and that’s not true… you can still be really good at what you do but present in a humble way… and that’s the key

If you are a job candidate and a have particular skills and attributes that have made you successful, it’s imperative you present those to a prospective employer… but the way you do it, with humility, makes all the difference in the world

Prefacing your features/advantages/benefits presentation on yourself with comments like, “I’ve been very fortunate to be blessed with gifts and I’ve tried to hone them…” or “I’m grateful for the attributes  God has given me, they have been benefits to the companies that I’ve worked for and would be for your company too…” or “I was a little bit better than average in my accounting skills, but fortunately one of my mentors pushed me as well as disciplined me to carry them to the highest degree…”

Make humility part of your skill set… using words like “fortunate… blessed… grateful” etc. will make all the difference in the world

Most people don’t recognize how many interviews, on average, it takes to get a job… if you ask most people, even professionals, they  speculate that it takes four or five initial interviews to get a job offer… well, the truth is that it takes 14… then you read it right… 14…

That’s 14 initial interviews to eventually get an offer that you would like to accept it… this average is based on the 2012 statistics of our recruiting firm… we place professionals in Sales, accounting, engineering, banking, IT… everything except healthcare… the range of these numbers are seven interviews for the people in IT to 18 interviews for people in sales

Most people aren’t aware of just how difficult it is to even get 14 interviews or how long it takes… it could take months… even a year… this number may change as the economy gets better… but you need to be aware of it…

This means that if you were a job candidate you need to take massive action to get interviews… you can’t rely on sending resumes over the Internet, or on friends to help you, or family… you got to pick up the phone and call as many people as possible and get an interview… you got get 14 of them to get a job

…i often talk about the fact that much of the hiring decision is based on the question of “do we like you?”..the answer amounts to 40% of the hiring decision..most hiring authorities won’t admit to this, but they decide this way..

this week the CEO of one of the companies we work with…a $500 million company…started from scratch by the CEO..on its way to $1 billion… shared one of his hiring criteria…he said:

“after we decide we think a candidate can do a good job for us, we ask ourselves ‘would we want to be in the duck blind with this guy..(or gal)’…if our answer is ‘yes’ we are likely to hire the person.’

now, if you have ever hunted ducks for any length of time, you get exactly what the CEO was saying…most of us duck hunters know that the time you spend in a duck blind isn’t shooting ducks..(i wish) it is quietly waiting for them in the rain, sleet, snow and cold…now the folks you are with in the duck blind make a tremendous difference in the success and enjoyment of the hunt…being in a duck blind with someone you really don’t like or don’t want to be around is absolute a-g-o-n-y…it is absolutely a-w-f-u-l…even if you don’t duck hunt, think about the kind of person you’d like to be within one foot of in a dark, cold, wet, rainy 10 ft. by 3 ft. box quietly waiting for ducks for 4 or 5 hours…when the ducks don’t fly, you are gonna talk with the folks in the blind…and what if you don’t like ’em???

get the picture???…think about it..that is about the quintessential ‘do we like you’ test…’would you want to be in a duck blind with this person’….brilliant!!

so, just know that the folks you are interviewing with are asking themselves and each other, ‘would we want to be in a duck blind with this person?’