I work for Guy Kawasaki. Thanks for the link to Guy’s blog posting: Everything You Wanted To Know About Getting A Job In Silicon Valley But Didn’t Know Who To Ask!

Mary-Louise

Penelope - How do you deal with all the negative feedback your getting from your faithful readers? Perhaps you should write an article about what makes you an expert to give yourself some credibility to your readers.

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Hi, Chris. A lot of people ask me about the negative feedback. I don’t actually mind negative feedback. You can’t really be a columnist if the negative feedback bothers you.

–Penelope

So what do you figure the story is for a guy who types in all caps and signs his name with the irrepressibly clever “Dick Long”?

The name would suggest high school. The all caps suggests a sixty year old who won’t be able to undo the caps lock until one of his kids comes home for a visit. I’m guessing old and disappointed in life, but it’s just a guess.

Either way, I would take it as a sign of progress that someone like that is not a fan.

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Yeah. I just saw him. I’m amazed that he’d take the time to come to the blog just to write that stuff. You’d think he’d have something better to do. I deleted the comments. The only comments I ever have to delete for being out of hand come on the days my Yahoo column runs….  I am thinking about that.

Penelope

I think that many people who read your Yahoo column forget that they are not your only reader. Today’s column is perfectly inline with your general theme and very useful to those who may not have a lot of experience interviewing or are having trouble.

The advice you give is very useful and those who criticize your proposed techniques obviously lack the self-confidence or social abilities (EQ?) to be able to execute them.

Telling stories, relating to your interviewer, and asking questions all add depth to yourself in the eyes of the interviewer. They make you stand out and be remembered. If the interviewer is offended by your actions then you just learned something about them which may help you make a decision if an offer is made.

One could ask these critics why they read Yahoo Finance at all. Writers and analysts on Yahoo Finance are researcher-writers, not typically people running the day to day operations of the companies they write about.

(I’m responding to the readers that claim that you have no credibility because you don’t work for a fortune 500 anymore, but instead you interview experts and summarize opitions. That’s what writers do; that’s what financial analysts do. People who write about publicly traded companies do their research do some interviews and offer an educated option (I’ve been one! I do know from direct experience :-).

So, why read newspapers or financial analysts if you only want to hear from people with direct direct experience? People on the inside don’t share it with idiots on Yahoo!

I’m a little surprized Yahoo lets them undermine the credibility of their financial website. I used to use it as a research source (although never read columnists until you started writing there), now I’m finding myself going to other sources for financial info somewhat subconsciously as I’m associating Yahoo with the idiots who don’t know what a newspaper column is all about.

“And each person you talk with will have some sort of personal agenda that will infiltrate your interview.”

This happened to me just this week. I’m interviewing for an administrative position at a tech company, and I went in for my third round of interviews. I met with a project manager whose body language told me that he didn’t want to be there — he leaned backwards in his chair, away from me, and he kept his arms crossed over his chest the entire time. About halfway through the interview, he starting talking about how much he liked working with the person who had last held the position I was interviewing for. I had already been told by several other people that the person who had left had caused problems by not showing up for work and by not completing projects that she agreed to do. I handled the situation by saying, “I’ve been told by others that [NAME] had some difficulty here, but it sounds like you had a different experience.” He waxed on about how they had worked well together, and I used it as a springboard to ask what other qualities he thought were important for the new hire to have. It got us back onto more neutral ground, but I’m wondering if it helped or if I just never had a chance to win him over because he wants the last person back.

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Lea, thanks for this comment. It’s a good example of how to turnaround an interview that’s going poorly. Often, it’s not that difficult to figure out that an interview is going poorly, but it’s almost always difficult to figure out, in the moment, what to do to turn things around. I like reading how you did it. I hope you got a job offer :)

–Penelope

“Manage your parents”

I have read about the involvement of parents in job fairs at colleges and it blows my mind. if I were in a position to hire, someone whose parents were overtly involed would go to the bottom of the stack.

Perhaps a parents would serve their children better by having them work a summer jobs so they can pactice job-getting-game.

From someone not that far removed from job fairs and the like, the thought of helicopter parents following you around at a job fair, in front of future employers, is mortifying.

I was recently involved in choosing interns for a college program my company sponsors. I heard one story of a young man who seemed so frustrated by his father’s presence at the job fair we attended that he seemed to be sabotaging all the opportunities his father was trying to broker. (I’m not sure whether this deserves kudos or contempt.)

This makes me wonder if GenY/millenials are really as dependent on their parents as everyone likes to say or if the dependence is being forced on us.

Great thought-provoking stuff, as always, Penelope. My number one piece of advice to candidates is to drop the mask and be themselves. Everything after that is tactical.

If you are not sufficiently confident to speak your mind and talk at a meaningful level about your approach in the workplace, then you probably aren’t going to get hired anyway and if you do - it may well be into a square peg in a round hole situation.

I work with job-hunters every day and the majority of them will point to negative past experiences as being on the basis of untruth. Naive job-hunters lie all the time, thinking that once they get into the company everything will magically sort itself out. Employers lie all the time too - dressing up job descriptions and hiding the reality of the corporate culture.

What healthy relationship can be formed on the basis of both sides misrepresenting themselves from the outset? It doesn’t work in love and it certainly doesn’t work in the world of work.

Manahan’s Mantra: IF YOU HAVE TO LIE TO GET YOUR FOOT IN THE DOOR, THEN THIS ISN’T THE JOB FOR YOU.

Rowan Manahan
http://fortifyservices.blogspot.com/2007/03/you-cant-fit-sows-ear-into-round-hole.html