Category Archives: Interview Skills by Alex Freund

Interview Skills by Alex Freund

Inefficiency Hinders Your Job Search

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Getty photo 23Most if not all job seekers reach at some point a heightened level of frustration with their job search process. It’s easy to understand, and it might be justifiable to blame the complex and convoluted job search process. It’s difficult to improve efficient and speed up the process. Loosely explained, efficiency is output over input and is expressed in percentages. The question before job seekers is whether they’re getting the expected results based on the amount of time and effort they’re putting into their job searches. In most cases, the answer is disappointing. So, what to do to increase efficiency?

In the world of investments, the most important factor for success is to know the right asset class allocation. Translated into the domain of job search, it means knowing how to determine the amounts of time and energy to devote to various job search activities.

Networking

Networking with people is by far the most effective job search activity. Sixty to 80 percent of people land their jobs through networking, and therefore, that’s what job seekers should spend their time on. For many, Networking is difficult and uncomfortable. And for those who don’t know how to be effective at it, networking represents a frustrating task with little results. For others, networking is second nature, and getting leads and referrals is merely a continuation of what they’ve been practicing their entire life—and not only when they need a job.

Applying for Jobs Online

Online job application is also an important aspect of the job search. Certainly, one cannot expect to win the lottery without buying a ticket. In the same way, one needs to apply for a job in order to be considered for it. On one hand, online job boards such as Monster and CareerBuilder sound appealing. On the other hand, sending off endless numbers of résumés into the black hole of applications can be a great way to boost your frustration level and waste your time. A better way is to search within SimplyHired or Indeed by using specific keywords you’re interested in and job locations you’re open to. The best tool is LinkedIn, where you can see exactly who posted a job and whom you might know at that company. Thus you can be much more strategic about your application.

Additional Advice for Increasing Your Efficiency and Your Success Rate

  • Be specific in your résumé. Applicant tracking software is looking for specific keywords.
  • Customize your résumé to the specific job you’re applying for. Recast your résumé to specifically show how your subject matter expertise solves the hiring manager’s problems.
  • Use as much as possible the target company’s own language. In other words, your actual words must match a lot of the words in the employer’s job description. Cut and paste the employer’s language from the job description to use in your résumé.
  • Make your résumé faultless. Reviewers have no patience for less-than-perfect résumés because there are thousands of other applicants they can look at who submit perfect résumés. Grammar and spelling count. Fonts, formatting, and lined-up tabs and columns count. Regarding that formatting issue, better practice is to unformat the résumé, reset everything flush left, and use no special symbols or software-specific indentions (such as in the bulleted items you’re reading here!)—instead opting for simple hyphens and word spaces to set off your displayed lists of accomplishments in your job history.

Cultural Fit: What Is It All About?

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What's YOUR brand?Many articles point to the fact that the job interview is really all about the so-called cultural fit of the candidate, provided the skill and experience requirements are met as well of course. The thing is that in addition to the hiring manager, several other company members, too, are interviewing candidates to add their own assessments.

For practical purposes, what’s called company culture can be separated into two distinct areas. One is influenced by the top leader of the organization, and the other is influenced by the departmental leader or the hired employee’s immediate supervisor.

Years ago, I worked at a Fortune 100 company that had a history of buying many other companies whose individual and distinct cultures had been kept intact and independent of each other all along. At one point, though, a new CEO took over and decided to instill one single culture throughout the hundreds of subsidiaries and affiliated companies under his jurisdiction. That action caused an amazing transformation. I compared the new CEO’s influence to a magnet approaching a bunch of nails: all of a sudden, all of the nails aligned and connected to the magnet.

Certainly, a departmental boss has impact on departmental culture. Often, when you ask someone a question like, What’s it like to work at that company? the reply reflects the person’s pleasure or displeasure with his boss and, at times, his colleagues.

So, how—during the interview—can a candidate seem to fit into the company’s culture?

Similar to the cliché that says, “A leopard can’t change its spots,” a person can’t radically change personality. But because the outcome of the interview is highly influenced by a candidate’s cultural fit, the candidate can at least attempt to make the right impression, which amounts to simply the same thing as adjusting the words in the résumé to match the job requirements stipulated in the job ad.

People may have different understandings of what lies behind the proverbial cultural fit. The most accepted notion suggests that cultural fit includes the display of characteristics related to organizational culture, such as values, language, and outlook. Culture is the behavior that results when the members of a group arrive at a set of rules for working together. The rules may include elements of decision making, daily work practices, and even such things as the office setup. For instance, some organizations are hierarchical—with office spaces and sizes linearly matching employees’ functions in the organization. At the other end of that spectrum are organizations that are very egalitarian—with open-architecture office space, in which all employees having equally open and equally sized spaces.

Before the interview, the candidate should explore with as many people as possible inside the company certain issues, such as:

* Whether the work environment is highly stressful or rather relaxed

* Whether promotion is from within or fresh experts are hired from outside

* Frequency of meetings

* Volume and tone of internal e-mails (formal or informal, friendly or abrasive?)

* Whether teamwork or individual effort is the typical means of problem resolution

* Whether employees’ opinions are solicited or not

* How well poor behavior and under-performance are tolerated

* Whether successes are celebrated and in what ways

The list is endless, but those are a few examples of issues pertinent to company culture.

 

The Worst Thing Is to Be Stuck in Your Career

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Business SuitMany of my clients say they feel suffocated in their careers. For whatever reason, they do not like the profession they have chosen for themselves: they feel they’re poorly fit for their careers, and they dislike everything associated with their jobs, their companies, and their bosses. So, the question is, what to do next?

Recently, I had such a client, who is a successful and experienced litigation lawyer but completely fed up with the profession and feeling stuck. In his case, we explored and evaluated other options in related fields where a law degree and years of experience could be beneficial.

One of his options was to move into the field of negotiation and conflict resolution as a mediator. For such work, his legal knowledge could be helpful. Another option was the banking field, wherein estate planning and tax planning are helpful services offered for depositors. Some lawyers gravitate into academia by teaching law or doing research in the field of law. Many lawyers are good writers too, and so, writing or journalism might be a suitable field. For instance, writing books about the law made John Grisham famous. Other lawyers have morphed into politics by joining the government. For example, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama used to teach courses in constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

Some lawyers become entrepreneurs, an occupation in which negotiation skills and knowledge of the law are essential and at times even crucial. Public advocacy is an area in which one influences policy decisions, and lawyers could do well at that. A lawyer could also consider moving into the human resources field by assisting with recruiting and human resources policies. Large businesses always need legal help in their mergers and acquisitions departments. And there are endless other options. How about becoming a Foreign Service diplomat, a law school counselor, or a law school recruiter?

As you can see, in this case we explored fields related to the skills and background of an experienced legal litigator, but the same process could be applied to the skills and backgrounds of those in other fields and professions. The process is not simple; it requires due diligence and willingness to accept change. Horses wear blinders to avoid distractions and scares, but looking all around and seeing more than just what’s narrowly in front could be helpful—especially in the face of a desire to change careers.

Networking Is Art and Science Combined

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free_27896721Networking has two purposes: (1) to get you your next job, and if that’s not right now, (2) to prepare for when you need to. Networking is the most effective way to secure a job nowadays. Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads—human resources consultant to the largest companies in America—says that if you network your way into a company to the point that someone internal there delivers your résumé to the hiring manager, that delivery increases your chances 10-fold. And that means a thousand percent!

Networking is an art because it requires imagination. At the same time, it’s a science because it requires practical and systematic activity and good administrative and follow-up skills. In this article, networking refers to in-person interaction—not social networking, which is a chapter by itself and complementary to in-person networking.

Networking is an indisputably critical part in the job hunt, and it’s easy to make mistakes. As we all know, the first impression is a lasting impression. When meeting a person for the first time, introduce yourself by name, shake hands, and be looking into the other person’s eyes. Your elevator pitch is critical too: make it short, memorable, and intriguing. Let the other person ask follow-up questions—to a level of interest. Most people deliver a too-lengthy and way-too-detailed soliloquy about their professional past. How much appetite do you think the other person has for that? It’s better to talk about your future destination and not where you’ve been in the past. The listener may be inclined to help you but can’t do much about your past.

Networking is clearly about developing a professional relationship. The other person, too, knows one hand washes the other, so if he provides you with introductions and leads today, you could be doing the same for him in the future. Make sure, though, that during the dialogue you don’t make the other person uncomfortable. Never put the other person in an awkward situation by complaining or creating a situation in which you’re seeking pity. Be positive, show energy, and, mostly, have a smile on your face. A smile means the same thing universally: it says without words that you enjoy the other person’s company, and it’s very inviting.

It’s a best practice to listen more than to talk. Once you feel the relationship seems positive, ask for the person’s business card. It’s likely that the person will ask for yours in turn. Once you have the person’s contact information, follow up later that day or the next with a short e-mail. If both of you feel mutually beneficial, this paves the way for further communication and mutual assistance. It would be a mistake to think the other person could offer what you’re looking for—namely, a job. But you never know whom that person knows or what leads and possible referrals you could get, and that’s ultimately what you’re after, of course.

Practice networking. It may not feel natural initially, but like other skills, the more you do it, the better you get at it. In fact, after a while, you may even actually enjoy simply getting to know new people.

The Interview: Why Wasn’t I Chosen

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What is your gut tellling you?From the interviewer’s vantage point, the selection process is about availability and choices. That principle applies to many things the rest of us do, too, throughout the day. For instance, isn’t it interesting that when a group of people dine together in a restaurant, some of them make their menu decisions within a few seconds, yet for others it takes an embarrassingly long time—and they’re still not perfectly happy with their decisions. The same principle applies to interviewers: I remember being interviewed years ago for 20 minutes and receiving the job offer on the spot; that was unusual at the corporate director level. At the other extreme, I heard of a person who was interviewed for a secretarial position by seven people over two months’ time—after the candidate had already worked in that department for three months as a temporary employee.

To sum up, it is impossible to predict the outcome of a job interview because we simply don’t know what the interviewer’s decision-making process is. How often has a job candidate walked away glowing from an interview, with that feeling of having aced it, and yet the job offer never came.

At times candidates speculate about the best time of day to schedule a job interview—if given a choice. Early morning—before the pressure of the day builds up—might be good, but the interviewer might not be fully awake yet. Maybe just before lunch. But then, maybe after lunch would be better. How ’bout near the end of the day? There are no clear-cut answers because each case is individual and unique.

A recent National Public Radio program interviewed Wharton and Harvard business school professors who discussed the results of a large, 9,000-subject, 10-year study of interviewing. The investigators concluded that what matters is the candidate’s performance relative to those interviewed earlier. In their analysis, they also talked about a phenomenon called the gambler’s fallacy—a theory that says there is a mistaken notion that assumes that the odds of something with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences. In other words, if you interview after two or three inferior candidates, your chances are better. This also works in reverse.

From my vantage point as an interview coach, I know that the only way to beat the odds is to prepare well and practice mock interviewing. Practice makes perfect.