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.
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Brad Remillard
