A useless list to help with your job hunt

Given the size of the world wide web, we all know that when searching for anything, you stand a good chance of stumbling across a significant amount of junk. I have been astounded however, by the amount of dross posted regarding "hints for job interviews", usually in the form of a "Top 10 ways to improve your chances" or "Top 10 reasons you will fluff your interview".

I am so infuriated by the lack of effort that has gone into these lists, which tend to include examples such as "Turn up on time" or "check that you are applying for a job that you can do", that I thought I would have a stab at creating my own list.

Top 10 Ways to improve your chances at job interview

10. Bribe the recruiter



9. Blackmail the recruiter



8. Kidnap the recruiter's pet and demand a job in return for its release



7. Don't turn up naked



6. Don't have bad hygiene



5. Listen to the questions



4. Demonstrate brand loyalty

If you don't get the picture above, read the story:
http://kanyinulia.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/ronaldinos-coca-cola-deal-terminated.html


3. Don't diss the interviewer with rudeness



2. Use flattery



1. Apply for a job that you can actually do

(and yes, for those of you that properly read the introduction, this is deliberate, as a parody to the tripe currently available on the net!)

Hopefully, if you carefully and diligently follow the ten steps outlined above, you will be more successful that I am currently being (please don't take this as a sign that my advice may be less than worthwhile. It is just down to bad luck that I have not yet found a suitable role!), and will find yourself gainfully employed in no time at all...

And if you are stuck on the unemployment roster for a bit longer, some words of comfort from Hal Lancaster:

"Getting fired is nature’s way of telling you that you had the wrong job in the first place"

Overqualified for the role

What is it about recruiting companies that when looking for candidates they somehow drop into the Dilbert parallel universe? I am getting really fed up with my quote of the month from responding companies, "We have chosen not to take your application further as you are overqualified for the role".

What does this mean?

If you consider any other facet of life, could you contemplate a similar comment?

- On boarding a plane
 "Sorry dear, let's not catch this flight. The pilot is far too qualified"

- On surgery.
"I am concerned that the surgeon is overqualified to perform my bypass. Do you have an inexperienced intern who could operate on me?"

- On Dining out.
"Please don't let the chef cook our puffer fish. I would much rather that the unqualified trainee have a go"

This is obviously nonsensical. In any given situation, having someone who is better at doing the role than not is invariably a benefit, so why is it that (particularly consumer goods) companies feel this urge to reject talent? It also ignore any aspects of motivation, passion, desire or attitude.

I have come to the conclusion (through painful personal experience) that there can only be one of five translations of "You are overqualified" from Dilbertese back into English...

1. We actually have found a suitable candidate internally, which means that we will not have to pay the recruitment agency any commission. We are embarrassed at all of the time and effort that we have wasted, do not want to appear stupid and unprofessional to our recruiter, to you or to our senior management, so are going to reject you by saying that you are overqualified.

2. We are operating a standard check box profile, and your expertise is greater than that required. We are therefore in a quandary as to what to check, and have taken the easy option of ticking the "N/A" box. Unfortunately, this has created a low score for you, and despite the fact that I am a human being and not a computer, I am going to leave my brain switched off, and reject you by saying that you are overqualified.

3. As recruiting manager, your capability terrifies me, and I can see you replacing me and doing my job better than I can within a very short space of time. Since I am an insecure individual, totally focussed upon my own issues and needs, and not at all interested in the benefit to the wider business to bring in great talent, I am going to ensure that my boss never sees you, and reject you by saying that you are overqualified.

4. We accept that you have great skills, but are more concerned about how long people stay in role, rather than how well they perform. As such, we are concerned that you might actually succeed at this job too quickly (which would make everybody else look bad and lazy) and would give us a problem in rewarding / promoting you too quickly, in case it set a precedent (despite your performance). Given that this is all just unnecessary complications, despite the obvious benefit that it would bring to the business), we are going to chose a second-rate candidate over you, and reject you by saying that you are overqualified.

5. There is actually something wrong between your skill set / experience / talent and the role that we are recruiting for, but since we are not going to recruit you, and you mean nothing to us, we cannot be bothered with taking the time to invest in giving you useful developmental feedback (which may help you secure a job somewhere else, be of greater benefit to society, and avoid being a burden to the state), we are just going to fudge it and reject you by saying that you are overqualified.

“Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how much you are willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it.”  Lou Holtz

Relativity and the Doors of Perception

Albert Einstein, describing relativity, once said "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute."

This relativistic nature of time perfectly sums up how I was feeling today, when I received a voice mail. The situation was entirely of my own making - I was in my car, driving back from another interview, when I saw the missed call and voicemail icon ping in. Since my roof was down (I have a little Mazda MX5 / Miata), I couldn't answer the call, or call back immediately, but when I stoped at some traffic lights, I decided to quickly listen to the message, at this point not knowing who it was from.

The message turned out to be from one of the companies that I have interviewed with, asking me to give them a call back. Nothing more, nothing less - no indication as to whether it was good news or a rejection.

How I wished that I had not listened to that message at that time! Instead of a nice drive home in the sunshine, relaxing after what had been a really positive interview, I spent the entire journey - which felt like every minute was an hour - analysing the voicemail in my head. Had that intonation been negative? Why had the assistant rung rather than the hiring manager?

And to really rub salt into the wound, I made it home at 5 minutes to 5, immediately put a call in, only to get her voicemail, and no return call ... So I now have to wait until tomorrow to find out what the call is going to say.

My wrong-headed decision to quickly listen to the message raises an important point about decision making, something that I have tought again and again to my teams, but in true slapstick fashion, failed to take heed of myself.

Circles of Influence/ Concern
When dealing with difficult situations, there are two circles - the circle of influence, and the circle of concern.


Within the Circle of Influence lies everything that you are able to influence, and have an effect upon.
Within the Circle of Concern lie all of the things which you cannot affect, but often waste energy and effort worrying about.

If you can successfully increase your level of influence, by being positive and proactive, the corollary is that you decrease the size of the Circle of Concern. If however, you are passive and reactive, your influence will decrease, and your concerns will grow.

This was the trap that I fell into today - I should never have listened to the message. I was not in a position to do anything about the message, and listening or not listening to it would not have changed the nature of the message. All I did was create a concern born of uncertainty and unknowing, which achieved nothing but to relativistically turn two hours of my life into a drawn out journey of concern, draining me of positivity, calmness and energy.

"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception"
Aldous Huxley

Perspective and Paradigm Shifts

It doesn't take much to create a paradigm shift in your life...



I was having what I would consider a "bad day" in my job hunting endeavours - one rejection, no follow up calls (two of which had been promised for today), and very little through my network or on the job boards of interest.

Then my daughter screamed from outside, where she was playing on the trampoline, and was just repeating over and over "my neck, my neck hurts".

In that instant, all of my worries about work transformed into petty irritations, if not total irrelevancies, and all of my focus was on my daughter, and hoping that she had not just permanently damaged herself.

Fortunately, one frozen pack of peas, some TLC, a cookie and one of her favourite TV programmes later, the neck pain had declined to merely "sore", and I felt that I was able to breathe again.

This episode though, does just highlight the importance of maintaining the appropriate mindset with regards to whatever you are doing. Whether it is job hunting (as in my case), working towards a presentation deadline, going for promotion, getting engaged, married, having your first child, it is important to ensure that you are not getting wrapped up in an introspective bubble, distorting your fears and concerns out of all proportion.

With planning and preparation, you will not need an accident as befell us to snap you out of your existing paradigm - merely having a preprepared mental image of "what if" ought to be enough to rearrange your priorities, and help you keep everything in proportion.

If you have not read "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People", by Stephen Covey (recently passed away, RIP), I strongly recommend doing so. Even if you do not agree with all of the content (as I do not), there is nonetheless something for everyone to take away and improve their self awareness and interactions with others.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Habits-Highly-Effective-People/dp/0684858398

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” 
George Eliot

Nine things successful people do differently

I came across this great article from Heidi Grant Halvorson this morning, which agrees with and expands on some of the discussions that I have been covering inmy earlier blogs. A really useful concise summary on how to facilitate achieving your goals.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/7dwath/:1P0L$G6$O:WHu+dxYd/blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/02/nine_things_successful_people.html/

Choosing a path

Despite being a confident, capable person, I am finding that looking for work whilst unemployed is particularly challenging. It is not just the feelings of failure - not being able to provide the income to keep my family in the way that I want to, being "passed over" in preference to others by potential employers - but a larger issue around life choices.

On the one hand, I am trying to stay focussed and targeted on finding my next role. Spending hours every day networking with old contacts, trolling job sites for suitable opportunities, building relationships with Recruitment agencies / talent managers / key decision makers in potential businesses  keeps me busy and focused on a clear goal, which I can measure simply as success /failure (depending on whether I get a job or not)

On the other hand, I am at home every day, am finding time to exercise, relax, catch up on missed films and books, and spending loads of hapy and fun quality time with my wife and kids.

This raised the really challenging issue of whether I SHOULD be looking for another full-time, corporate, rat-race role, or ought to consider using this opportunity to do something completely different, that maintains a much better work/life balance. The reason that I say challenging, is for the following reason:

Am I thinking that a change in approach to life is the right thing to do because it would provide more quality of life, or is it a cop-out, and an excuse to not have to keep submitting myself to the risk of rejection and failure at every job interview? It is far too easy to end up going round in circles, and arguing both sides of the issue, and the real problem is that ultimately I am greedy, and want to both have my cake and eat it - to have a great corporate job that is stretching, interesting and fulfilling, whislt still having the time to exercise, relax and have plenty of quality time with my family...



As an aside, have you ever noticed how most of those who choose to leave the rate race and down-size to live in the country, always had jobs such as Investment Banker, and are walking away with mllions in the bank? I've always thought that it would indeed be an easy choice, and significantly easier to implement, if the two sides of the coin were:

a) Keep earning a filthy amount of money every year
b) Retire to take up full time hobbies such as Ferrari driving and holidaying in Monte Carlo, whilst watching your accrued savings rack up huge amounts of interest to fund your lifestyle.

So very different from:

a) Keep working tremendously hard to just about keep your family in food, clothes and a holiday once a year
b) Down-size and live in a commune where, although you get to spend quality time with you family, you worry yourself into an early grave from always wondering where the next paycheck is going to come from to pay the food bill, and you can never afford to take your kids on holiday...

Mental Attitude

I had an interview today.

Reading an article on the BBC site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18902643) made me challenge myself with some interesting questions...

1. Should I approach every job interview with an overwhelmingly single-minded belief that I will get the job, in the expectation that all of that positive mental energy fizzing around will rub off on the interviewer, make me raise my game, and make me an irresistible hire; or would my PMA come across as arrogance, and make me effectively unemployable?

2. Should I approach every job interview with an anticipation of failure in my head, with the risk that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I successfully talk myself out of every role; or does that heightened sense of failure make me sharpen my answers, provide me with an element of humility, and make me more likely to succeed?



As with all approached, there are pro's and con's to both sides of the argument, and as can be seen with the sporting experts in the BBC article, there are often widely diametrically opposed (and even entrenched) positions.

My personal view is a shade of grey (no, not one of those 50!). I think that you need to plan for success, taking the time to clearly scope out your strengths, weaknesses, competencies and examples, aligned specifically to the requirement sof the job spec, but that you need to approach every interview with a pragmatic realism.

Everything else being equal, you have a statistical chance of 1 in about 4 (if you make it to final interview). To think that you are so much better than the other 3 or so candidates also being interviewed is bordering on delusion, and it is much better to accept those odds, and work onmaximising your chances throughpractice and excellence, than relying purely on PMA.

The maxim to apply is "the more I practice, the luckier I get".
(variously attributed to Gary Player, Jerry Barber, Lee Trevio, Arnold Palmer and Sam Goldwyn amonst others!)

If you have any views, opposing or supportive, I would be interested to hear them.

Online advice - Superficial or Serious

One of the challenges when job hunting is trying to identify genuine best practice, and gaining worthwhile feedback from trustworthy sources. In an effort to improve the likelihood of securing that great job, I try to surf the net looking for articles that may well just prompt some self-reflective learning, or make me consider an alternatibve approach to answering certain interview questions.

On the whole, this is a useful exercise, and you quickly get to know where you will find a good source of articles that tend to match your needs. I found that LinkedIn Today was a quick and easy repository, especially a lot of the Harvard Business Review and Forbes posts.

However, you can also come across a lot of incredibly superficial content, sometimes dreadfully so. With my apologies to the authors (who I do not know) I came across this link tonight -
stop-screwing-up-your-job-search-in-these-ten-ways - and could not help but think that with the exception of number 10, the other 9 suggestions were lightweight, and not much more use to me in developing my job hunting capability than reminding me that to shave, wash and wear clothes to an interview is better than failing to do so...

I understand that is is difficult to synthesise potentially complicated coaching advice into a simple one sentence message, aimed at the widest possible audience, but I would expect a contribution to Frorbes to be targeted at a level of job hunter who understood the basic tenets of human interaction and sensible behaviour, and would instead be looking for advice that is less common-sensical, more inclined to make me stop and think, and even if I were not to adopt it, would appreciate it as a worthwhile addition to the overall knowledge bank of job hunting.

I hope that the authors can forgive my criticism, and accept that it is not aimed at their capabilities or their writing per se, but I have just used their article as an example of how difficult it can be to set the right tone. I leave them with this thought from de la Rochefoucauld, "We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it".

Head in the game

One of the hardest things that I have found about job hunting whilst not in employment is ensuring that I always maintain the right mental attitude, have my "head in the game".

When working, you are by default in "professional" mode, so should you receive a phone call from a recruitment agency, a headhunter or a potential employer, you tend to already be in the right frame of mind to respond appropriately.

However, when you are not working, and before that phone rings you have been slouching on the sofa, surfing the web, playing with the kids, or completing one of the numerous household tasks delegated to you by your wife, it can be difficult to make that instant transition into "work mode".

I have found that the most effective way of dealing with this mental disjoint is to defer the call. It is a simple tactic, that does not cause any issues for your caller, but gives you a tremendous advantage when compared to diving right into the call. Prepare yourself a selection of delaying phrases, such as:

"I am a little bit busy right now. Could you call me back in X minutes?"
"I am on my mobile. Could you call me on my landline instead. The number is..."

This gives you the time to mentally adjust, prepare yourself, and hence perform much more effectively when the call comes.

What you have to remember is that the person on the other end of the phone is unaware of your activities, does not know how keen / desperate you are to secure work, or know how busy / idle you currently are. You need to suppress any and all negative or inferior emotions from your head, and act in a thoroughly confident, professional and appropriate way.

By the way, I am not saying that this is easy - when any opportunity presents itself that may lead to re-employment, it is difficult to not act like a frisky puppy, and act super-keen, enthusiastic, and overly helpful. What you HAVE to recall - with your head in the game - is that the person on the end of the line is not only looking for passion (unless you are applying for a cast role at Disneyland). They will be mainly interested in your skills, your competencies, and for character traits such as gravitas, humility and self-awareness, all of which tend to be drowned out when you are too enthusiastic.

So, keep calm, be prepared, think clearly, and you will give yourself the best opportunity to succeed.

“The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.” 
Benjamin Disraeli

obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence

And another thing...

What is it with recruiters / employers that makes them believe that "competitive" or "excellent" is a worthwhile description of potential salary? When I look at a job vacancy, I am looking at several aspects:

 - Location
 - Salary
 - Job title / seniority
 - Wider benefits
 - Company

Without pretty much all of these details, it makes it very difficult to know whether a role is suitable to apply for, resulting in far too many wasted applications to recruiters whose definition of competitive / excellent turns out to be significantly lower than how I would define it....

A vacancy that was advertised with similar vagueness on the other criteria, such as "excellent job position" or  "great location" would not attract quality candidates, so why on earth do they believe that such generic blandness is acceptable for the salary range?

I know that salary is negotiable (whereas the others generally aren't) but it cannot be beyond the wit of man to provide at least a ball-park figure, to at least anchor the role within an experience / seniority bracket, can it...?

"Obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence" - Robert Heinlein

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Recruiters - Think!

What is it about recruitment that appears to make companies lose all sense of propriety, righteousness and clear thinking? Two separate strands here, both linked:

1. The interminable delay in moving through the recruitment process, with the gap between the advert being placed and someone being appoointed often dragging into months. If the role is critical to your business, get it filled, ASAP! Every day that the role is being "covered by the team", or being "seconded to someone for development" (but not anyone who is good enough to be given the job!), is a day that the maximum value is not being generated from the role. Delaying filling it does NOT save you money - it may save you wages, but it will absolutely lose you contribution / margin / influence / team motivation / profit.
If the role is not crucial (hence your foot dragging in filling the vacancy), bite the bullet, and cancel the recruitment. Restructure and make do with what you have...

2. Outward communication. As a job hunter, I have a desire (occasionally verging on desperation) to be successful and be offered the job, but that does not give companies the right to over promise and underdeliver. The favourites:
 - "We will absolutely get back to you by X" (followed by days of silence)
 - "This is the end of the selection process, and we will now make our decision" (followed by an invite to meet yet another decision maker / undertake another test)
 - "We will give you feedback" (followed by the blandest of comments such as "the other candidate had a better fit". I don't care about the other candidate, I want to know what I can do to improve!!!)

The problem is that I know none of this is deliberate; it is life getting in the way, with the recruiters being tied up by their own internal bureaucracy, with managers being "distracted" by the day job, by them being focussed on THEIR needs of filling a vacancy,and not really thinking about the applicants in any great detail at all (and I say this having been in this recruiter position myself many times, and with retrospect, wishing that I could have taken more time to ensure that all applicants, including the unsuccessful ones, were appropriately treated).

Remember: Treat others as you wish to be treated

Hot under the collar

Another day, another debacle.

Not only did a trip to London to visit a "job consultancy" prove fruitless (no specific roles, but more than happy to help me spend my own money on "marketing myself" more effectively), but I endured the joys of pre-Olympic London in 30 degree heat.
 - The ripe smell of rubbish drifting on the air
 - People in Olympic-branded outfits trying to get rid of their London maps
 - Southern trains providing a train with no opening windows and broken aircon (think "Alec Guinness in the sweat box" in Bridge over the River Kwai, and you won't be far off the mark).

Still, things could be worse - at least I was't trapped in a glass cable car 90 feet above the Thames for nearly an hour, or caught up in lengthy tailbacks as the Oplympic VIP lanes went active.

Thought for the day : There is invariably someone worse off than you.

kick in the proverbials

Just when you think that things cannot get any worse, life has a funny way of ensuring that you do get slapped round the face with a kipper!

As a middle-aged, male, professional, struggling to find a new permament job, it is hard to deal with the daily rejections:
- "we have candidates who more closely meet our criteria" (ouch!)
- "you are overqualified" (very annoying!)
- silence (rude, annoying and frankly highly irritating!)

But you do your best to keep your chin up, look forward, and carry on to the next day. So you take a break, click on the paper online, to be confronted with this headline...

Accountant who lost £70,000-per-year job reduced to eating ONE meal a day after applying for 700 jobs without success

Not sure whether to laugh, cry, sympathise, or be grateful that it is not me...A vision of the future, a cautionary tale, or just coincidence.

And now it is time to start a new day all over again....