Job Search Solution Blog by Tony Beshara

It seems like I spend a lot of time writing about people not thinking through the interviewing process and saying stupid things that end up costing them a job…

This week we had one candidate who, in a final phone interview with an HR director… right before they were going to offer him a job… was asked why he left one of his previous jobs… he said he thought for a moment and then said, “well, they told me it was because of sexual harassment, but I didn’t do anything and I really don’t know what they were talking about.”

In speaking to the candidate, he told us his old company owed him $60,000 and according to his contract, if he was fired for cause they wouldn’t have to pay money. Okay… fair enough. He said he had absolutely no idea where the sexual harassment accusation came from, but that’s what their lawyer told him when he asked why he was let go. He never investigated or questioned the dismissal. He simply let it go.

There was absolutely no reason for him to tell the HR director he was dismissed because of a sexual harassment charge. It is nowhere in his record. He was never given any reprimand… nothing. Why would anyone tell an HR director they were dismissed for sexual harassment if no one has a record of it and, more importantly, it didn’t happen? This was not some low-level, rookie candidate. He was a guy with 20 years of experience who had earned well into six figures. So he can’t claim ignorance. Maybe stupidity… but not ignorance.

Another one of our candidates told  one our clients he was dismissed “with cause” but didn’t know what the cause was. He claimed he knew he was fired for a good reason but couldn’t remember what the reason was. Even after we asked the candidate to think really hard about what he said, he still claimed he couldn’t remember exactly why he was fired.

This week, another one of our candidates was asked by the hiring authority if he had any questions.  According to the hiring authority, the candidate said, “geez, I never thought of that question…I guess I’m not prepared.”

Another one of our candidates, upon arriving in the hiring authority’s office, announced that she only had 15 or 20 minutes to interview because she had to go pick up her kids at school.

 Our organization deals with highly educated, very professional people in just about every discipline. And I’ll admit these are only a few examples of the hundreds of candidates we talk to and work with.

People have to think!…THINK… they need to ask themselves, “how does this sound to a hiring authority?” What HR director in their right mind is going to recommend hiring somebody who tells them they were fired for sexual harassment.

I don’t know what else to say…

Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine addresses how creativity works… excellent book …it comes to a number of conclusions about the fact that creativity is really not as much a gift as it  is a developed trait..

Psychologists, in recent years he claims, have studied the relationship between persistence and creative achievement and have cited the fact that most creative people have a phenomenal ability to stick with their work in spite of all the difficulties and challenges they’re faced with… technical term he uses for this trait is grit..

It made me realize that one of the reasons we have so many people in America who actually just give up looking for a job when they need one is that they lack grit…

Many of these people who give up looking for a job just plain don’t know what to do… after talking to a few friends and family they resort to hitting the send button with their resume thinking that is the work of “looking for a job.”  Grit in looking for a job has to do with developing a job search strategy and executing on that strategy no matter how hard or difficult it may be… putting up with the ups and downs of the job search… the rejection, the refusal, the  not getting called back, being told you’re the “best candidate” and then never hearing from the folks who told you that… grit is what it takes to keep on keeping on in spite of setbacks…

Grit is focusing on the process and not worrying about the results even when it’s emotionally difficult…

Got grit?

Often, when I’m coaching candidates to be very aggressive and ask the kind of questions I wrote about last week, they say things to me like, “well, Tony, I don’t want to appear desperate and coming on that strong makes me look like I am.”

This couldn’t be further from the truth. It all depends on the attitude you take in asking the questions… if you ask the questions in a nervous, desperate, fearful manner, you will appear desperate.

The way to keep from appearing desperate and still  be intense comes along with the idea of focusing on the process and not the result. If as a matter of the interviewing process, you get in the habit of asking everybody you interview with, “are you going to hire me?” or “are you going to recommend that I be hired?”and you practice these questions so well they simply become a part of your natural interaction with an interviewing or hiring authority (i.e. part of your process), then they will come across as confident with no fear of the answer.

If you focus on the process and even get a “no” for an answer, you’ll simply move on to the next opportunity. If you get a “yes,” you will simply move on to the next step in the process.

That’s the difference between being desperate and intense… focusing on the process and not worrying about the result.

It happens at least three times a week… I coach and teach my candidates that they need to ask three questions at the end of every interview:

“How do I stack up with the other candidates you’ve been speaking with?”

“Do you have any concerns about my ability to do your job?”

“What do I need to do to get the job?”

If they are speaking to someone other than the hiring authority that may be a screening interview or or an interview beyond the hiring authority:

“Are you going to recommend that I be hired for this position?”

I can’t tell you the number of times I ask candidates if they asked these questions… even after I told them… they say something like “Well… it just didn’t seem appropriate… we were running out of time… it just didn’t like the right thing to ask… blah, blah, blah.” In other words what they’re saying is, “I just didn’t have the guts to ask the cold hard question of  ‘are you going to hire me’… I just couldn’t bring myself to get the courage to run the risk of being told ‘no’… I just couldn’t do it.”

Last week, I sent five candidates to one of my clients. I instructed them all to do the same thing and sent all of them to www.thejobsearchsolution.com which teaches in absolute detail exactly how to ask these questions. Only one… I repeat, only one had the courage to ask these questions.

My client said, “It was kind of amazing that only one of the five actually asked for the job. Tony, I thought you said these guys are really solid professionals. Only one had the courage and guts to ask if I was going to hire. I want that guy to come back.”

I know this takes practice and I know it takes courage, if you really want to set yourself apart from all your competitors you absolutely have to ask these cold, hard questions in an interviewing situation. You need to know if you’re a candidate or you’re not and you need to know what you need to do to get the job.

I can’t make it any more clear than that!

Poor poor pitiful me
Poor poor pitiful me
Lord have mercy on me
Woe Woe is me
—-Linda Ronstadt, 1973

This happens often with candidates who have been “done wrong” by everybody from their present boss, passed bosses, present company, past company, parents, ex-spouses, present spouses, teenage kids etc., etc., etc….and they let it all hang out in the interview.

Everybody has wronged them… they had a miserable life… they can’t get a break… they blame everyone… and they try to get sympathy on the part of the hiring or interviewing authority by sharing their woes…

STOP! you can never go into the interview singing “poor pitiful me”… I don’t care how hard life has been, how lousy you’ve been treated, how unfair life is, how you can’t get a break… you just can’t come across as pitiful.

At least three times a week, we have to warn  candidates to stop complaining … employers and hiring authorities DO NOT WANT TO HIRE PITIFUL PEOPLE… they’ve got enough problems and don’t need anymore pitiful people in their organization…

Sometime back, we had a candidate who was going through a rather hateful divorce… unfortunately, she shared her plight with the female hiring authority… when we told her that it was a bad idea to do that, she told us it didn’t turn out to be such a bad idea because the hiring authority had just gone through a terrible divorce and they spent at least half of the interview sharing their terrible situations…

Unfortunately, the hiring authority thought the candidate’s skills were good but refused to hire her because, ” — she’s going through a terrible divorce like I did and I was so pitiful for so long I couldn’t function, I just couldn’t hire anybody knowing what bad shape they would be in when they tried to work.”

So, please share your “pitiful me” stories with your therapist, priest, rabbi, counselor… anyone but a hiring authority…

Our client had just let go a VP after only four months on the job… and that’s a big deal for a $50 million company… the guy had made two or three major mistakes with one of their larger customers and it was plain the guy wasn’t going to make their company better… so they fired him.

They called us and, over a period of four weeks, interviewed a number of very qualified candidates… after a number of lengthy interviews they came to the conclusion that Joe, one of our candidates, was the most qualified to do the job so they sent Joe to visit with the CEO

Everyone in the company was so afraid of making a mistake, they were thinking of all kinds reasons that it “wouldn’t work” with just about every candidate we presented… including Joe. The CEO was no different and felt like, even though Joe could do an excellent job for the company, he wasn’t as charismatic as they might like. So, the CEO decided to pay a retained search firm to do a nationwide search for possibly a more qualified, more charismatic candidate. They explained their situation to Joe in a very business, but kind way. They did not tell him it was his charisma they were concerned about. They simply told him they felt like they needed to talk to other candidates.They made it clear that the answer wasn’t “no,” it was just “not now.”

Joe wasn’t wild about the decision but he had a good job and although he was disappointed, he was smart enough not to burn any bridges. After four months of the “search,” at least they admitted they hadn’t found any candidate better than Joe, so now they are ready to engage with Joe again.

We don’t know if Joe will get the job or not… hopefully he will… he should, because he is very qualified. Here is the lesson. When Joe was told that he was not going to be hired, he didn’t get upset or pissed off or let his pride get in the way by saying something stupid like, “okay you guys, forget me as a candidate…” Joe was smart. He was very graceful about being told “no.” He wrote everybody in the company whom he interviewed with that he understood about them wanting to do a nationwide search to compare and then expressed the thought that if they didn’t come up with a great candidate he would love to still consider the opportunity.

He left the door open for them to reconsider him. By being graceful and smart he gave himself an advantage. Most candidates wouldn’t have done that. They would have “taken their ball and gone home.” I guess there’s a chance that Joe may not take the job even if it’s offered…and it hasn’t been offered. But the point is Joe was smart enough to leave the door open even though he was faced with refusal… at least for the moment.

Good job Joe!