How to Win Friends and Influence People, or, Don’t Waste Your Recruiter’s Time

I interviewed someone yesterday which reminded me of a few things:

1. There’s only one opportunity to make a first impression. Yes, it’s cold and windy outside.  It could also be boiling hot.  It doesn’t matter.  You’re going on an interview, for God’s sake.  So why do you want to show up looking like a slob?  Is it because I’m the recruiter?  Do you think you’re going to bowl me over with wit and beauty?  I’m the GATEKEEPER!  If you don’t impress me, you don’t move forward.
2. Why don’t you look like your picture? I’ve done my homework.  I have your old resume.  Yes, folks, executive recruiters keep resumes if someone looks like they have good qualifications.  So do non-executive recruiters and company recruiters.  I’ve even done my homewotk – checked you out on LinkedIn, tried Googling you, even looked you up on Facebook and Twitter.  Did you think I wouldn’t notice that you look like someone else?  (See my comment above about first impressions.)
3. Did I tell you what the job was and what it paid? Oh, I did.  And you said you were interested.  So why was the first thing you said to me “I’m not interested in this position” followed by “I thought it would be good for me to meet you.”  Now that we know that you only think of yourself, ask me if I wanted to spend the time meeting you?  Reference points 1 and 2 above.  Yes, it is good for recruiters to be familiar with candidates … on our schedules, not when we’re trying to satisfy an urgent client need and not when you think my time is less important than yours.  Especially if you haven’t made a good first impression.

What was the upshot of this interview?  The person isn’t going to have the opportunity to meet this client.  Worse, they aren’y going to have the opportunity to meet any client, at least not with our imprimatur.  Worst of all, their resume has been trashed (after saving it for 10 years) and they’ve been deleted from our database.

Now here is the curious point:  Someone who is highly successful and highly compensated has never done this to us.  Hmmm.

The role of the employer in an artisanal world – Part 1

We’ve been talking about the artisanal world for a very long time.  Most of what we’ve written has been focused on employees and potential employees on subjects such as how they need to think about their careers, taking responsibility for career progression, training to achieve goals, and so on.

Every employment transaction has two parties: the employee and the employer.  Now it’s time to talk to employers about the artisanal world and what it means to have artisanal employees.

So let’s go back to basics:

1.  The average tenure in a company for an employee is now three years, down from five years in 2004.  What does this mean to an employee? No job security.  What does it mean to an employer?  A world of new, possibly cheaper and more currently trained workers.  So why do hiring managers still insist on asking employees what they want to do in five years?  Why do they make hiring decisions based on those answers?  Your hiring managers need to think about what they need done and who is best suited to do it.  That’s what hiring decisions need to be based on, nothing more.

2.  To promote or not to promote, that is the question.  Companies seem to prefer hiring someone new.  There is an covert attitude, leading to overt decision-making, that people trained elsewhere are better than people your own company has trained (i.e., “If you really knew what you were doing, you’d be working somewhere else.”).  Our question is this: if a company hires such incompetents, why would anyone want to work at that company?  More importantly, why would any client buy the company’s product or service?  The decision about whether to promote or hire should be based on the specific need – but any assumption that someone already employed cannot have the necessary skills is just plain stupid.

3. Invest in your employees?  Are you kidding? That’s a very good question.  If you don’t, they’ll leave.  If you do, they’ll leave.  But can a company afford to lose critical knowledge about its business or about its clients’ businesses?  So yes, companies have to invest selectively in those employees they expect to promote within the three-year employment window.  But don’t waste money hoping to simply retain an employee – that’s money wasted.  Also remember that every promotion accepted is a new job for the lucky employee.

Remember What Your Mother Said (Or Should Have) …

Everyone tells us that the economy is getting better and we’ve certainly seen signs of increased hiring.  Unfortunately, we’re also seeing very bad behavior on the part of hiring companies.

Many of our previous posts have been geared to the job seeker, providing advice on resumes, manners, getting their foot in the door.  Today, we want to talk about what companies are doing to candidates and the terrible impressions they’re leaving with those candidates.

1. The average tenure at a company is 3 years – a veritable revolving door of people coming and going.  All of which means that the person you’re interviewing today may be interviewing you soon.  The impression that a bored, arrogant or deceitful person makes is bad enough – but what’s worse is the follow-on impression that the company condones this behavior.  You’ve now lost a potential employee and you’ve possibly lost a potential client.
2. It’s amazing how many companies are using contract recruiters.  It’s equally amazing how little they know about your firm, your culture, successful hires, serious managers, priorities, and so forth.  Interviews are also opportunities for candidates to learn about firms.  Remember that the coveted job seeker is evaluating your firm as intensely as you’re interviewing the candidate.  If the first interviewer can’t answer some very basic questions, you’ve lost these candidates.  They may go through the process, but they’re not likely to accept your offer.  Remember that thing called opportunity cost?
3. Don’t disappear into “radio silence”.  This doesn’t mean that you have to acknowledge every resume you receive. But if you have someone in for an interview, especially if you have them in for second and third round interviews, don’t pretend they vanished into the ether.  You’re under no obligation to hire anyone, but common courtesy should apply to all exchanges, commercial and otherwise.  My favorite recent case of perfidy was the manager who told a candidate after the third interview that she would be hearing from one of his direct reports the next day to confirm a start date, and then disappeared – no phone call about the start date, no courtesy call to say they’d changed their minds in favor of someone else.

As we just said, employment is a revolving door.  Remember that you never know the circumstances under which you’ll run into someone again.  Today’s job seeker is tomorrow’s employer.  Today’s job seeker can be tomorrow’s customer – or, if you keep it up, someone else’s.

How Not to Track Mud Through the Hiring Process

It was nearing the end of another stimulating day at BrikWork.  I was fiddling with my iMac, trying to get some utility or other to function in some way it was never meant to in the first place.  Just as I was ready to explode the underlying kernel of my Unix system, thank goodness my loyal and long-suffering partner came into my hovel, collapsed into a chair, and blew some hair out of her eyes.

“You know that guy who interviewed the other day with ______________?  Well, I think he‘s now out of the cycle because his emails keep bouncing.  Now they don’t think he’s for real.”

I felt bad for her; unlike me, she worked very hard for this client and took them seriously.

I had to scratch my large, squarish head and wonder.  The client(s) had met this guy, checked some preliminary references, and now they didn’t think he was a real boy.  There had to be more to it than that.

“OK,” I said, Sam Spade-like. “He must have done something else to poison the well.” (I actually used another term, but, since this is a business site, I don’t want to offend my gentle readers.)

After some investigation, it turns out that the client was sending our candidate such long and complicated forms to his email account, that his ISP was forced to treat the assault like SPAM.  The client immediately therefore branded the candidate as unclean – however unfairly.

Now, as we all know, the client – much like the customer – is always right.  There’s no point in arguing.  It is what it is.  Everyone has to wipe whatever condiment off their face and move on.

But it all leads up to my point:  Everyone in the hiring process should work to minimize the tiny, seemingly silly elements that can potentially muddy up the works.  Client organizations, however large and important, should remember that when they bombard someone with an inordinate amount of material electronically, it might be perceived as something bad and get rejected; don’t blame the candidate for this.

On the other hand, when candidates know they are in active job-search mode (and, trust me, I often wonder if they sometimes do) should ensure that all their contact sources are functioning properly:  cell phone numbers are working and not forwarding to the wrong places, and email accounts are prepared to receive massive client documents and other materials.  Alert your ISP if you have to.

Most importantly, candidates must be prepared to respond IMMEDIATELY to client requests for interviews, information and insights.  Sorry, but they who pay the fiddler get to choose the tune.

Now, after this helpful admonishment, I’m going back to my Mac and see if I can singe my eyebrows off.

“Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored …”

I love George Sanders. Charismatic, elegant and witty (even with his own lines), he is always a delight to watch on Turner Classic Movies.  What has always amazed me is that Sanders seemed to be one of the more interesting people you could ever meet.  Just think of the repartee and fascinating conversations you would have over scotch or good wine …

And yet, here was a man who checked out on his own because he was bored.  Possibly, being the most interesting person everyone knows also means that everyone else you come into contact with is going to be, by definition, less interesting. Only George can answer that one, and he ain’t talking anytime soon.

But speaking of wanting to slit my wrists with a dull knife, I have been looking at resumes lately that convey a truly unfortunate characteristic of the writer:  that he or she is bored with his or her job.

Now this might be true for many of us, but managing to convey this sense of terminal ennui onto paper means two things:  (1) You might have career in letters if you can that powerfully portray an emotion in writing, and (2) you’ve just given a prospective employer one more reason to kick you out of the running before you even got a foot in the door.

Even if you are daily leaving puddles of drool on your desk, you’ve got to express enthusiasm for what you do in your resume.  Stop and think about what you do.  Now, start by focusing on your accomplishments – not just on your functions – and you will almost involuntarily add a compelling element to your work story and history.

Remember, autumn is upon us, school has begun anew, and it’s time to take a deep breath and forge ahead.  By thinking dynamically, you might actually act dynamically.   And that can only help everyone in the mix – especially you.

Don’t Sell Yourself Short While You’re Selling Yourself

Over summer drinks of ice water and make-what-hair-you-have-stand-on-end Starbucks coffee, my partner and I were chatting with a good friend the other day who had decided that he needed to ramp up his job search.  This is an accomplished and talented man, an attorney, who has a specialized set of skills and has worked for niche firms for much of his career.  Since then, he’s been slowly building a practice, but really wants to work for someone else.

He’s the kind of pal we commiserate with often, and he’s a good sounding board on just what the true state of affairs really are, i.e., are we actually draining the swamp or are we fending off alligators.  This can get confusing.

In talking with him, we realized that his confidence was sorely undermined by being laid off about six months ago.  And he was doing himself a huge disservice; it was apparent that his last firm – which works in an area severely body-slammed by the recent Great Recession – thought enough of him to keep him on until they just couldn’t manage it anymore.

Our conversation made us come up with some important points to keep in mind as you job search (especially if you are, as is our friend, a trifle older):

1. Being laid off is not a statement of your capabilities.  If you lost your job in this current downturn, the performance issue isn’t yours, it’s your firm’s or it’s that of the general economy.
2. Tenure in job these days is down to 3 years. If you worked for a single company for longer than that, you are or were doing very well.
3. If you were promoted while you were working for that company, congratulations. You achieved something that’s eluding most employees since companies seem to prefer hiring from outside to promoting someone (don’t ask me; I’m still noodling this one on my abacus).
4. We’re still working with people who lost their job in the fall of 2007, so if you lost yours after that, your loss is the fault of the economy and you shouldn’t give up hope.  In fact, your company was most likely trying to keep you employed for as long as possible.
5. Use your time off to improve something. Improve your educational credentials, physical fitness, community involvemet, or simply expand your interests.  No one wants to hire a slug.
6. Stay in touch with your network or, if this is something you didn’t pay attention to, start developing your network.  Be prepared to extend yourself to others wanting to network with you.  You never know where the next opportunity will come from.
7. At the same time, be kind when you are in a position to help others.  You never know who will cut you off because you were too important to be bothered with them when they were in need.
8. You have to be flexible in your job search.  That means keeps every option going for as long as is reasonable, meaning you have to consider consulting, working for someone else and starting your own business and you have to pursue all options simultaneously.  It doesn’t mean keeping an offer dangling because something better might be around the corner.  That kind of selfishness will cost you dearly in reputation and goodwill.
9. Remember that you are the artisan of your own career. Companies owe you nothing more than compensation for work performed plus any benefits promised as part of your employment package.  They don’t owe you a career.
10. Since you own your career, think continuously of what you want to do with your life and how to get there.  Try to make your moves to achieve your goals and remember that just making money isn’t a goal.

Now, put these ideas to good use.  As for me, I’ve been told to start wading back into the swamp.

In the Heat of the Noon (or, How I Maintained My Composure Despite Being in a Suit on a 95 Degree Day)

The other day, the weather was beautiful, tolerable heat, very low humidity. And I was able to wear my usual hot weather office attire: tasteful dress shoes, tailored slacks, and not-too-disgustingly-stained polo shirt.

The next day, my partner and I had meet some clients. Naturally, I clad myself in a nice tropical wool weight suit. The weather, of course, cooperated by spiking to about 95 degrees with humidity to match. Well, as you can imagine, it wasn’t a pretty picture; unfortunately, I’m a schvitzer. Seal my neck with a buttoned collar and necktie in summer, and I sweat so much that I can convince you that you’re dishonest.

Sadly, business requires these shows of respect. The best you can do is move as slowly as a New Orleans funeral procession, drink cold water and hope for the best.

Also, what’s up with “tropical” wool? It’s still wool, for pity sakes! It’s designed to keep you warm in winter, not cool in summer. This fantasy is up there with my mother lowering the blinds and closing the windows to “keep the heat out.” Yeah, right, that always worked well; you could tell by the number of passed out relatives scattered about the premises.

Then, of course, no matter how bad men have it, nothing compares to encasing oneself in nylon pantyhose on a nice hot, humid day. This is punishment that no one should endure. I know women are grateful that a no stocking policy is becoming acceptable in more and more situations. Still, sometimes there’s no getting around it.

Where am I going with all this, besides venting my always-overloaded spleen? A conversation with a friend seeking new opportunities convinced me that thinking about how to present yourself in these hot times is worth going over one more time.

1) Sometimes you have to wear a suit or stockings. In an interview or presentation situation, there often is no getting around it. The best thing to do is make sure you have attractive, summer-weight attire that can ease the burden. One thing you can do is double-check with hiring company or client about what their office attire consists of; showing up too well dressed can often make people feel bad, and you don’t want to do that.

2) Give yourself plenty of time to get where you’re going. Don’t rush; you’ll just look like a mess once you arrive. This won’t help you cause.

3) Don’t dress in the lobby. Yes, you can stop and pull your tie up or change your shoes. But don’t do what someone who showed up in our lobby did: Basically strip down to skivvies and redress from there. You may walk in looking cool, but you also look like a gigantic nut.

So, follow these basic rules and you should be all right. As for me, I’m off to dump some ice cubes down my pants. Stay cool!

Achieving Recommendation Letters That Actually Recommend

I was recently working with someone assigned to our career transitional services practice, helping them to put together a list of references willing to write recommendation letters. This process set me thinking about what makes a really good, really helpful recommendation letter.

1) Written references are not outmoded. For one thing, they are permanent. They are on paper, so to speak. Once you make the final stages of any interview cycle, references will be requested. You have the advantage of being able to provide written references that can be easily followed up with a phone call or email. Getting any leg up you can is helpful.

2) Yes, you can ask for written references. Most companies have rules about current employees providing references for other employees on company letterhead. However, people can write reference letters on their “personal” letterhead, which means they can write:

John/Jane Smith
123 Main Street
Anytown, USA 01010

at the top of any Word document and then go to town describing how wonderful you are.

Now, if you have people who are not comfortable giving you a written reference but are willing to give a verbal one, don’t despair. Keep an up-to-date list of these individuals and every so often, check with them to ensure that they are still willing and able to provide you with good references and recommendations.

3) Get references from the recently departed. If you find your recent colleagues still working for your former employer are squeamish about writing references, ask those you respect who have recently left the firm. They are most likely not under any such strictures and can put pen to paper for your benefit.

4) Strike a balance among those providing you with references. If possible, the majority of your references should be from those you reported to. However, in this age of 90, 180, 270 and 360 review cycles, it helps to have at least one from a peer and, if possible, one from someone who reported to you. Hopefully, this shows you are not in the running for this year’s Captain Bligh Award and are able to manage correctly not just up, but down and sideways. See how flexible you are?

5) Guide the focus of your different letters, if possible. A friend who heads up the entire North American HR function for a major company and who teaches business ethics suggests trying to get your various references to focus on and emphasize one main area of your capabilities. He says that from the HR perspective, not much stock is put into “generic” letters. The point here is to get people to be specific in their comments, not just “he/she’s a great guy, blah, blah.” And giving people an idea of what to focus on is often welcome, as people don’t always know where and how to start singing your praises.

Don’t Join the Zombie Horde

The smell of pasta arriving from the corner forces me to lift my bloodshot eyes from my computer screen. As I poke desultorily at my dish, the meanderings of the linguini begin to remind me that my faithful partner and I have been asked to review a lot of resumes lately. Word is the job market is picking up and people who weren’t worried about their resume suddenly are.

Why linguini? Because we’re seeing a ton of tangled logic being strung together through these CVs, and, I hate to say, we’re both horribly disappointed in the quality of the resumes coming before us.

We’ve both been hiring managers. We know how to tell a person with excellent skills from a person who skates by. You know the type – they change jobs in good times and nobody really cares what they’ve done because there’s a hole in the organization chart that needs to be filled and someone else will make sure the work gets done.

So let me say it again: We are horribly disappointed in the quality of the resumes we’re seeing.

We call some of these people in for interviews because we suspect that, deep down buried beneath the palaver, there’s more to these people than their resumes show. Here’s what’s disappointing: whoever is writing the resumes isn’t bothering to know or worse, learn, their subject – at all. (it’s even worse when the candidate has written the resume.) What job was satisfying, what job was exciting, what job was tedious…

I’d be curious to know whether the person writing the resume had any interest in the person they’re writing about. Because the writer has turned the candidate into a lifeless, uninteresting, bored nonentity… and, consequently, not someone you’d hire.

Why are candidates using these resumes? Don’t they care how they’re portrayed? Don’t they understand the hiring process?

No, your resume doesn’t get you a job offer – but it opens the door to an interview. Would you willingly let a Zombie in the door? Haven’t you ever watched a Zombie movie? What fool would invite a Zombie in? Why waste your time with someone like that?

We’re all used to internal recruiting being the entry level HR job and we’re all used to internal recruiters who just acted as conduits. Well, that used to be true. Like every other specialty, this economy caused push down in the HR ranks. So you have senior generalists doing recruiting these days and these senior generalists are far more astute when sifting through resumes than their earlier entry-level counterparts.

A couple of years ago your resume would be picked up because you passed the key word screen. Not enough these days – you have to show some fire in the belly, some signs of life, of interest.

You, as candidate, are responsible for your resume. If you did work that you enjoyed, that was satisfying, that you want to do again – think in terms of showing some glee when you describe your responsibilities and accomplishments. It’s your obligation to yourself to be passionate about what you do for a living; it’s your obligation to someone who would hire you to be the finest choice.

So, again, your resume opens the door. You close the deal. Bottom line: You can’t close the deal if you can’t open the door. Separate yourself from the horde by make your resume stand out with vitality, interest and accomplishment.

Deny your internal Zombie. And leave the spaghetti for dinner.

How to Stay Relevant in Today’s Transitional Search Market

Candidates are asking themselves a lot of questions these days about what is going on in the hiring market. What are the new trends in corporate hiring? How do you make sure you are ready for the new post-recession workplace while still in transition? What do you need to consider and incorporate into your career planning moving forward to compete?

With the turnaround that is, believe it or not, starting to happen, professionals are asking these questions because they are struggling through what is now shifting from a down hiring market into what we call a “transitional” hiring market.

Just what are the characteristics of a transitional market? Imagine the worst of a down market coupled with the worst of an up market. Everything is gray, muddled and foggy. That’s’ why the transitional market is hard on everyone – hiring managers as well as candidates. It’s actually pretty surprising how little gets done in a transitional market. As a hiring manager, the concern is to not make a mistake — which might cause you to lose your job or not get a promotion. As a candidate – and, don’t kid yourself, you are still indeed a candidate even while being considered for an internal promotion or lateral move – your concern is to get the commitment from on high so that you can prove your value.

One reason for this murky status is that companies are now approving positions on the basis of what they need at this very moment to solve a problem today. They have become accustomed to constantly evaluating each position and deciding when it is no longer necessary. They’ve gotten used to doing this for the last three years and it has become a corporate way of life. So you need to get used to this as well, because it’s a methodology that is not going away anytime soon.

The result is that we are all being forced to deal with the “hired gun” syndrome: companies want a specific individual known to have a specific skillset to handle a specific job, and once that need is fulfilled by that individual, then both the position and the person are pretty much history.

No wonder we’re finding that the average career at a company — career, mind you, not job — will last about three years. Yes, three years!

So how can you as a candidate combat and triumph in this job miasma? Follow these four steps to success:

Step One – Make sure you have a solid infrastructure package in place. How is your resume looking these days? Time to get it into absolutely tip-top shape. And that’s not all. What about your follow-up letter package? You know, networking letters, thank you notes, etc. You need a battery of appropriate correspondence ready to send out as soon as you meet with various decision-makers, decision-influencers and individuals who can simply steer you in the right direction. Never, ever, forget to follow up with anyone who helps you in any way.

Step Two — Define your online presence. You do it so why shouldn’t they? You will be Googled, Facebooked and otherwise violated web-wise by prospective employers and peers. Be prepared! Take down those drunken pictures of you taken at last year’s Black & Blue Ball. Put up something more sedate. And, very important, make sure your information is consistent throughout your online presences, i.e., LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, et al. These days, inconsistencies in these online resources is the same as lying on your resume.

Step Three — Make sure your credentials and references are in order. Pssst … how up-to-date are your references? It’s best to get them in writing so there are no surprises when a prospective employer asks for them toute suite. Also, make sure your credentials are in order and available upon demand. Don’t take chances.

Step Four — Take the opportunity to improve your credentials. Use this chance to start the masters program you’ve been thinking about for some time. Get the certification that will increase your attractiveness for the opportunities you’re interested in.

Step Five — Reconnect with and refresh your network. They’re out there … your friends, colleagues, former bosses. Most of them love you for who you are; some don’t. Nonetheless, start reaching out to these people and get them working for you, discovering opportunities that you might never otherwise find out about. And remember, be nice; thank these kind people. Share with them the really good photos from last year’s Black & Blue Ball.

Honestly, the best way to make sure you follow these steps correctly is to work with a firm that specializes in just this kind of work. Not just some firm that makes outrageous claims for outrageous sums of money. Too many people who are out of work have set themselves up as brand and career consultants; frankly, these people are not qualified to help themselves, let alone other professionals. Find a firm with a track record of results and who can provide you with testimonials of success. Feel free to email me with questions at rwesterhoff@brikwork.com or call me (212) 738-8442.