This Is How to Get Your Next Job

Andrea Kay

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814432228
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

"Why didn't you hire the last ten people you interviewed and passed on?" Leading career expert and syndicated columnist Andrea Kay asked numerous employers that single, simple question because of what she felt seemed a glaring disconnect in the business world--millions of educated, qualified people either out of work or unhappily employed, despite an increasing number of companies with job openings they can't seem to fill. How could that be? This Is How to Get Your Next Job is the story of her quest for answers and, more importantly, the surprising conclusions she was led to by these employers frustrated with not being able to fill these positions. The overwhelmingly common answers she received time after time were not about skills or experience but about how applicants behaved and spoke during the interview. From lack of preparation, to pushiness, to a subtly defensive attitude, these simple behaviors that prospective employees exhibited before, during, and after interviews ended up nullifying their otherwise-qualified résumé.Now, in this well-researched book based on candid insights from real-life employers, job hunters can learn how to take control of how they come across to the people in charge of giving them the exciting, rewarding opportunities they are seeking. Show them why you're the perfect fit for their job!

one

You Are What You Seem

Everyone’s got an opinion. You do. My mother certainly does—especially about my hair, shoes, and clutter in my closets. But that’s another matter and nothing you need to concern yourself with.

The opinions you should be attentive to are those held by the big “They”—the people who can hire you.

These are people like Eric Zuckerman, Rob Basso, Michael Zwick, Dianne Durkin, Sander Daniels, Allan Young, and Alex Churchill, all successful business owners. These folks—plus plenty more like them—have jobs they’re trying to fill. Jobs? Yes. There are jobs begging to be filled.

Maybe they have the perfect one for you. Maybe not. Later, you’ll hear more about them and other hiring managers hungry for the right people to work at their companies. For now, you’ll want to hear what they and others who hire people for their organizations think, and why. Because understanding that will help you stand out among millions of other workers competing for the same jobs and will be your ticket to getting hired today and in the future.

Of course they don’t represent every employer. But what they think overall is pretty much what every employer I’ve talked to—from small to medium and large companies in all types of industries—has told me. You don’t have to talk to every employer to know this: When it comes to finding good people, it’s really, really, really hard.

It’s so hard, some employers have given up looking.

How can that be? With millions of able-bodied unemployed or unhappily employed workers, why can’t they find people to hire? What do they want that they’re not finding?

It’s not what you’d assume—the right technical or functional skills—or what most people call “the right skills.”

And it’s not the right experience either.

Yes, experience and skill matter . . .

And yes, some jobs in information technology, finance, engineering, and other areas are hard to fill because special talents and functional skills are needed to perform the jobs. At a time when everyone (politicians, employers, headhunters, recruiters, and futurists) is obsessed with talking about jobs, many also point to skill and talent shortages. In some areas.

And yes, for many jobs, education can also be a factor.

But . . .

For now, assume you have the so-called “right” experience, technical skills, or education. Because, as you’ll hear in a moment, even with all of that, employers say they still can’t find the right people.

You may be the most talented person who ever walked the good earth and possess the right and proper technical skills. But you still may not get hired. Here’s why: it’s how you seem.

Why They Aren’t Hiring You

I asked employers this simple question: Why didn’t you hire the last 10 people you interviewed? And you know what every one of them said? It was because of how the job applicant seemed based on how he or she acted. Before, during, or after an interview. Sometimes it was what a person did or didn’t do, or said or didn’t say. In an e-mail. On the phone. Or face-to-face. It could happen in the first three minutes of an interview. Or as one manager told me, in the last three minutes of walking an interviewee toward the exit.

Fair or not, the employers said the behaviors people exhibited were very revealing. The behavior influenced them so much that it predicted not only what kind of employee someone might be and whether the person could do the job, but also that elusive, hard-to-nail-down issue: whether the person would be a “good fit” at their company. Turns out most people didn’t “fit,” according to the employers. More on “fit” later.

“There’s a correlation between the response you send an employer and how someone would be on the job. It is predictive of someone’s performance.”

—The conclusion of Bill Strauss, chairman of Strauss & Troy, a Cincinnati law firm, after trying to find a part-time marketing director

I should point out that these employers didn’t come to this conclusion lightly. It took months—even a year—of interviewing candidates for the open positions they had that led them to feel discouraged and disheartened about finding good people for their organizations. As one CEO of a small East Coast business told me after dozens and dozens of interviews, “We all know there is massive unemployment. What I want to know is, where are the qualified, hardworking employees?”

So according to employers eager to hire and build their businesses, whether to hire or not hire someone—or even bring them in for an interview—came down to this: how the job applicant seemed.

Now before you have a conniption, thinking: What can I do about that? I don’t control how employers think about me and how I seem to them! hear me—and them—out.

Naturally you don’t control their brains. How someone feels about you when they first meet you depends on many things. According to Jack Mayer, professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, factors that can influence how someone feels about you include a person’s frame of mind at a particular moment. The temperature outside. Whether you’re similar to that person and whether you make the person feel appreciated. Personal beliefs, preconceptions, and experiences will factor in.

And sometimes you can’t do a darn thing about meeting someone’s criteria. Mayer, who once helped a car dealership with hiring, told me that the sales manager said the only criterion he used when deciding whether to hire someone was the applicant’s astrological sign.

But that’s a whole other issue.

When it comes to people deciding how they feel about you, the process is not straightforward and perfectly logical. They don’t analyze what they see, but “we do react to how we feel when we see it . . . and after a few moments, we have formulated a conclusion,” according to Kenneth Manges, forensic psychologist.

Since employers are human, they also do what psychologists call “negative filtering”—focusing on the negative and failing to pay attention to the positive, according to psychologist Elizabeth Lombardo.

“The human mind is a mismatch detector, always noticing what’s wrong before it notices what’s right,” explains sociologist BJ Gallagher. “Our brains are hardwired to notice what’s missing, out of place, or faulty.”

So guess what happens? There’s a tendency to see one less-than-perfect trait and overgeneralize that you’re not the right fit, says Lombardo.

But you still have more power than you think to influence what they conclude about you: by what you say and do. And I’m going to share with you what you can stop doing and saying, and start doing and saying so that they stay interested. These are things you do control. For now, let’s focus on how they think and what’s behind it.

Their thinking may seem picky. But when you hear it from their side, it’s not so unreasonable. In fact, if you were in their shoes, you’d probably think and feel the same way. We’ll test that later.

Even in a good economy, getting hired or not comes down to whether you can do the job and what kind of employee you seem to be. Even in prosperous, thriving times, people with the power to hire are deciding who you are by how you seem—based on how you act.

But in a tenuous economy—when employers don’t have the luxury, time, or money to make costly hiring mistakes—they put even more emphasis on how you are and how you seem to them, and whether to hire you as a result. In difficult economic times, there is less leeway and less tendency to give someone the benefit of the doubt when it comes to hiring. Employers will be more watchful of what you say and do. And they should be.

They’ve Been Burned

Some have become cynical and wary because of bad experiences with new hires in recent years. These were people given the benefit of the doubt. People in whom the employers had faith. People they wanted to believe could do the job.

Take the time Dianne Durkin, president of Loyalty Factor, a consulting and training firm in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, hired a new person after months of interviews. The night before the employee was to start, Durkin got an e-mail from the person saying, “I decided not to take the job,” with no explanation.

The next person she hired (who had been out of work for two years) came into her office his second day and said, “Boy, you guys really work hard. I don’t think I can do this,” and left.

So now when she interviews, she watches for signs that someone is unprofessional and unreliable. One simple test: Do they follow up as they say they will?

To test this and determine whether someone is right for the company she gives assessment tests. But it’s not just the answers to the test she looks at. It’s how the person handles it.

In one instance, she gave an applicant the test to take home with the agreement that the person would send the results the next morning.

“The applicant calls later that morning saying she just woke up,” explains Durkin. “She sounded very confused, saying she just had a big argument with her husband. I think she was drunk or on drugs, she was so incoherent. She called back three or four times, saying, ‘I really need this job.’”

Then there was the person who might have had the right skill set, but wanted to be paid under the table. Can you blame her for thinking the applicant was dishonest?

An entrepreneur in Ohio spent nearly $30,000 to prepare his office and train his first employee. He had interviewed about 75 people over six months before he hired a young woman just two years out of college. After four-and-a-half months on the job his new employee, who never mentioned being unhappy, drove to the office in the middle of the night, packed up her things, and e-mailed her resignation.

Durkin, who consults with other small businesses, says, “I hear daily from hiring managers saying they cannot find competent professional candidates who have a solid work ethic, dress properly, and have good communications skills. They ask me, when hiring, how do you read between the lines to determine real competence vs. fluff?”

One way employers do that is to pay close attention to what job hunters say and do, and how that matches up with what they’re loo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 You Are What You Seem
• 2 Tell and Show
• 3 15 Things You Should Never Do
• 4 15 Things You Should Never Talk About or Say
• 5 10 Things You Should Never Wear
• 6 15 Things You Should Never Do Once You Get a Job or in Your Career—Ever
• Conclusion: How to Make It in This Wild and Crazy Time
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author