…Don’t try to sell a “package deal”
Every once in a while something so innocent and yet so disasterous comes up and this is one of them… it’s the idea of selling a “package deal”…
A “package deal” is the idea that a candidate goes in for an interview and finds out the hiring authority may need another person either like him or her or a complementary person to them… like any software salesperson finding out the company they’re interviewing with also needs a sales engineer… and then the candidate proceeds to try to sell both himself and another person he or she knows… he or she communicates the idea they can bring with them…
The candidate thinks they are enhancing themselves in the eyes of a hiring authority… but most of the time it either muddies the water or backfires…
Three weeks ago, I had a candidate who thought he would help himself out in the interviewing process by getting one of his previous associates involved in the interviewing process with the company I had sent him to… He was a salesperson, interviewing for a sales job and his previous associate was a systems engineer… he sold the idea that they had made a perfect team and had been very successful before working together…
I won’t get into the details, but in the final analysis they hired his friend and didn’t hire him… he’s pissed, the relationship is strained…i.e. he felt that after he got his friend the interview, his friend didn’t talk as wonderfully about him as he had spoken about his friend…
The moral:… sell yourself, get the job, show up for work and then if you feel compelled to bring a friend into the company to interview, do it then.
…has the market gotten better?
I get asked this at least three times a day… don’t hold your breath… this is going to be a long dig out of the hole we’re in… the boom that brought us here was long and so the bust is going to be as long..duh!
I experienced six recessions since I got into this profession in 1973… they averaged 12 months as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research…
This most recent recession has lasted, according to them, 18 months…However, the employment recession takes nine months longer than the economy to recover… we have just started seeing that recovery.
Companies are still fearful… lots of medium and small sized businesses can not get loans… the extension of the Bush tax cuts is a relief, but it is only for two years… nice, but not long enough…
Companies are doing more replacement hires than they are expansion positions… but nonetheless their attitude is a little better…
What this means is that, if you were looking for a job, you still need to sell yourself better than any other candidate and work harder at getting more interviews than you ever imagined… the other day I heard economists say that within three years, employment will be back at 6%… that’s still a long time… don’t expect miracles… don’t expect it to get easier
…two unfortunate mistakes
Being a successful interview can boil down to two or three very small things… You gotta THINK…”How is this going to sound on the part of the employer I am speaking with?”… Has to be your constant question…
One of my candidates was doing very well in the interview… an interview that was lasting almost 2 hours… he knew he was doing well… the hiring authority asked him if he had any questions.
The candidate stated, “I’d like to know what the career path is with this job?” He apparently said it in a rather demanding way… and there was no need for him to say anything like this, but he did… the employer took it to mean the candidate was concerned about where he was going to go beyond the present job he was interviewing for… there had been quite a bit of turnover in this particular position, unbeknownst to the candidate, and the last thing the employer wanted to hear was how a candidate was going to “springboard” into a different job from this particular position…
At the very end of the interview the hiring authority asked the candidate if he had any other opportunities he was interviewing for… the candidate said he was “close” to a couple of situations and was expecting an offer the next day…
The hiring authority simply asked who was he expecting an offer from… the candidate wouldn’t tell him… the candidate said it was really none of the hiring authority’s concerned who he was getting an offer from… very, very bad answer!
These two faux pas made the difference in the candidate being eliminated…
Think!… Think!… little things and making a real big difference in an interview.
… Way to go, Steve
Steve makes it through two interviews with a $30 million company and he has a final one with the CEO… he doesn’t do poorly, but he knows he didn’t hit it out of the park either…
The CEO calls and tells me he’s going to pass on Steve … he loves his energy and aggressiveness but he doesn’t think Steve’s experience relates to what they do very well… when I tell this to Steve, he communicates that the CEO wasn’t paying attention during the interview…
Steve decides he is not going to take “no” for an answer so he tells me he is going to go over to the CEO’s office and wait for him…
The next morning at 9 AM the CEO calls me and says, “this guy Steve I interviewed the other day is in my office… why?”… I tell him I have no idea…
An hour and a half later, Steve calls and says he got the job… he explained to the CEO that he didn’t communicate very well why his experience was perfect for their company… way to go, Steve!
…more about stories
Learning stories… These are stories about what you might have learned … either from successes or from failures … they could be about your successes or your failures as well as other people successes and other peoples failures…
People love to hear stories about how you turned failure into success and what you learned from it..we all have those stories…make sure you have one ready, too…
Value stories…These are close to learning stories … but they’re more like examples of values such as honesty, integrity, character, “do the right thing,” … etc.
“I learned the value of hard work by having four jobs while in college… I always had plenty of spending money and even saved money”… Again, not hard to come up with or find … just have a couple of them…
“I know which are thinking” stories… These are stories that center around issues the hiring authority might have about your background or your experience that you address before they are brought up by the hiring authority…
These are a great way to deal with concerns in your experience or your background that an employer might have … for instance, if you’ve had three jobs in three years, you know a hiring authority is gonna be concerned about that … so you say, “it’s obvious I’ve had three jobs in three years and that is a big concern, I’m sure for you and it is for me to … here is what happened…”
“I never completed my degree because my father died and since I was the oldest of my family, I had to go to work to support the family…”
These are stories that bring up issues obvious to a perspective employer and you need to answer the concerns with a story before the issue is even mentioned … these kind of stories take a little practice and for every risk you might have in your experience or background you need to have a story to explain it…
Please remember that to interview effectively you do not have to have all six types of stories … in fact two or three personal stories about you and two or three business stories about how and what you learned in the process will suffice … they need to be short… no more than 45 seconds ..and need to highlight a particular point of your career…
STORIES SELL!
…Six types of stories … the first three
there are six types of stories… This doesn’t mean that you have to demonstrate all six types in the interviewing process … however it’s good to know the types of stories there are so that as you envision them and tell them you can “categorized” them
The first type of story is “who I am” stories … these are stories that identify who you are, where you’ve been, where you come from, etc. … stories about you growing up, working your way through college, personal challenges as you’ve grown up, personal stories about yourself that show you to be a loyal and quality employee … are all “who I am” stories…
“why I am here” stories… These are stories about what you’re gonna do for a new employer… Positive stories as to why you’re looking for a job… “I love what I do and I love the people that I’m working for … unfortunately…(short story) “… and you better make it an engaging in positive story as to why you need to change jobs or why you are changing jobs…
” vision “stories… Stories about the future… what the company would look like when you were there based on the changes and impact you had on the companies that you have worked for in the past… In other words,” this is how like transformed the companies that I worked for before… “
