Getting Professional Help Can Shorten Your Job Search – Example 2- Interview Mistakes

The first article addressed how to handle the problem of turnover. This example deals with two simple issues that could have resulted in the person not getting the job because of simple mistakes that were easy to fix. The person just didn’t know how. Any professional career coach, outplacement firm, job search coach, or executive recruiter should know exactly how to help you: 1) not make the mistake in the first place and 2) how to overcome it once it has happened.

The candidate called me and said, “I think I may have just blown an interview with the way I answered one question. Is there anything I can do?” “What was the question?” I asked. He replied, “The CEO asked me what I wanted to do with my career, and I told him that I love marketing, and wanted to be a VP of Marketing in a medical device company.” Since he was interviewing for a VP of Marketing position in a medical device company that would seem to align well with the what the CEO was looking for. Also, given the candidate’s background and experience it was a reasonable answer.

Then the CEO came back with, “Well, that could be a problem here, as we like to hire people that want to move  up in the organization and that strive to be better and not just do a job.”  OOPS, there is a big communication gap here. The CEO meant one thing and the candidate interpreted it another way. This is often the kiss of death.

So what would have been different had this candidate been working with a professional?

1. The mistake should never have happened. The candidate wasn’t prepared. From a professional’s point of view this question should never have been answered. It is clearly vague and too open to interpretation. What does career mean, what time frame is the CEO addressing, what is the motivation for asking this question, how soon does the CEO expect a person to move up, etc? These all  need to be clarified prior to either answering the question or integrated into the answer.
2. The candidate would have been prepared not to fall into this trap. It wasn’t a trick question, and certainly not a deliberate attempt to trap the candidate. It was just one of those questions often asked that are so vague that the candidate doesn’t really know how to answer or there are just too many ways to answer it.
3. Once this happened, a professional would know exactly how to minimize the damage. Since the candidate felt this was the turning point in the interview, and this was a critical mistake that would cost him the job, it can’t go unresolved.

Again, like the first example in this series, it was an easy fix. There was no guarantee the fix would work, but it certainly couldn’t make matters worse . At this point, the candidate was convinced he wasn’t getting the job. There was no place to go but up.

Since the candidate now knew what the CEO was looking for in this question, we simply expanded on the candidate’s answer in his thank you letter. The candidate explained that he thought the CEO was looking for a short term answer to what he wanted in his career, so he answered it with the next three to five years in mind. However, longer term he would expect to move  up in an organization within five to eight years. Obviously, a little more detail was added, but you get the picture.

It worked, and he did get the job. We know it worked because the CEO told him that the thank you letter changed his mind.

I believe, and the candidate believes, that the professional help was directly responsible for getting this job. He believes it saved him additional months of searching for a position. As he told me, “Even if I found a job one month later, it would have cost X in lost salary.”

Getting professional help can save you thousands of dollars. Take your monthly salary and multiply it by how many months you have been looking for a job. That is the cost of unemployment. Finding a job one month earlier because you got professional help is cheap compared to the alternative.

The final article in this series will help you identify the right professional. There are many frauds and unqualified people posing as professionals that take your money and don’t deliver results. These must be exposed and avoided. There are also many outstanding people that are true professionals, highly skilled, and with great experience, that are worth far more than they receive from helping candidates find a job.

We offer many free tools to help you. CLICK HERE to download a free sample cover letter that  recruiters like. CLICK HERE to download a sample thank you letter that will make sure you are remembered. CLICK HERE to download a free LinkedIn profile assessment that will help you build a great LinkedIn profile.

Finally, consider joining our LinkedIn Job Search Networking Group. It has a wealth of great articles and discussions to help you in your search. CLICK HERE to join the other 5,300 members of this group.

I welcome your thoughts and comments. If you liked this article, please tweet or re-tweet it so others can benefit.

Brad Remillard

Getting Professional Help Can Shorten Your Job Search – Example 1- Turnover

I find it interesting that people will pay for help for just about anything but their job search. People pay for dance lessons, golf and tennis lessons, piano lessons, financial help, help with taxes, the list is endless. Yet for possibly the most important part of one’s life they refuse to pay for help. So many choose to continue a job search instead of seeking professional help. There are many good career coaches,  job search coaches, executive recruiters and others to help you. Most aren’t that expensive, when compared to what one loses each month in salary by not getting a job.

Let me give you two examples of how getting professional help impacted two people with their search. First, it wasn’t that they were doing anything wrong, it was that they weren’t doing everything right and didn’t know what to do when issues came up. The results were consistent, they didn’t get the job. This was too bad because as  you will see, these were easy issues to handle. The candidates just didn’t know how. By the way, neither did all the non-professionals in their network.

Example 1:

This candidate had been on the market for about 6 months. He had been getting interviews and coming in second. Most of the time he was told some story by the company or recruiter about why he didn’t get the job. Rarely the real story. Then, because he had a friend in the company he was interviewing with, the true story came to life. He was told the original reason for not hiring him was that the other person had industry experience. His friend found out the real reason was that he had what they called “high turnover.” His last three jobs had lasted on average only 18 months.

So the obvious question to me was, “How many jobs in the last 6 months where he came in second, had he lost because turnover was the real reason?” We will never know, but I’m going to assume at least one.

When we first started working together, this issue obviously came up. It turns out this is a very simple issue to handle, especially in this case. Like so many candidates, he just didn’t know how to handle it in the hiring process.

The way to handle it was to face it head on. He figured if they didn’t bring the topic up during the interview that it wasn’t an issue. WRONG. It wasn’t an issue that the company felt they needed to discuss, because right or wrong,  someone had already decided he had high turnover, so there was no reason to discuss it. WRONG.

We changed that. Now the candidate brought it up first in the interview. In every interview. He had nothing to hide and so he forced the discussion. At the beginning of the interview when asked, “Tell me about yourself.” or “Give me a quick overview of your background.” he would start out with, “From my resume it may appear that I have had a lot of turnover. I can understand why most people would think that, I would think that too if I looked at my resume. Let me explain the reasons why I left each company, and in many cases, I didn’t leave the company, the company actually left me.”

This was a huge change in the interview. It was no longer left for the company to decide if it was high turnover without understanding the issues. It was right out there to discuss.  Does this mean all companies will accept the reasoning? Absolutely not. All it means is that the ones that are open to understanding why bad things happen to good people will.  For those companies that aren’t open to understanding the reasons, the outcome will be the same even if he didn’t bring it up.  He wasn’t looking for those companies. He wanted the one company that would have passed on him, but once hearing the reasons changed their mind. That was the one company that would reconsider him.

Within two months he started working.

Please don’t comment back on how bad the companies are for not probing about his background, or who would want to work for such narrow-minded companies. That is the purpose of the article. Quite frankly, when unemployed for 6 months, most people don’t care about narrow-minded companies. They care about a paycheck.

The purpose of the article is to encourage you to think about getting professional help. I will outline what professional help is in a future article so you don’t get ripped off.  CLICK HERE to read the article,  Job Seeker Scam Alert – Job Seekers Are Getting Ripped Off so you don’t get ripped off.

This person was earning over $150,000 a year. That is $12,500 a month that he was losing because of a silly reason that wasn’t handled properly. For every additional month that he was searching this was the cost. I think the cost far outweighed the benefit of getting a little professional help.

We offer many free tools to help you. CLICK HERE to download a free sample cover letter that recruiters like. CLICK HERE to download a sample thank you letter that will make sure you are remembered. CLICK HERE to download a free LinkedIn profile assessment that will help you build a great LinkedIn profile.

Finally, consider joining our LinkedIn Job Search Networking Group. It has a wealth of great articles and discussions to help you in your search. CLICK HERE to join the other 5,300 members of this group.

I welcome your thoughts and comments. If you liked this article, please tweet or re-tweet it so others can benefit.

Brad Remillard