The reason I spend so much time telling you to have someone else write your resume is that I have done it before, and it worked out really well for me.
I thought of myself differently after getting help with the resume. This is because a good resume is not a list or a work history, but rather, a story. And the way we tell stories about ourselves really reveals who we are, but it’s very hard to craft a story about our work when we are so close to the details day in and day out.
Stories are powerful. If you have a coherent story of yourself, then your resume reads like an organized plan. If you have no idea what your story is, your resume reads like a disjointed list. The most effective resumes show a timeline of progression in your life in a way that creates a story that will stick in the reader’s mind.
It’s hard to sift through all the resume writers and figure out who is good. So people ask me all the time for the name of the company I used. The problem is, that company is no longer in business.
However a bunch of the people from that company continue to do the resume work as freelancers. And one of them, Elaine Basham will rewrite two peoples’ resumes for free this week.
If you want to have Elaine take a crack at your resume, send a three-sentence email to me by March 25 that says what is wrong with your resume now, and what you want to accomplish with a new resume. Elaine will pick the two people who are most able to benefit from her service.
For those of you who don’t end up working with Elaine, you might end up having to write your resume yourself, so here are some of the most common mistakes.
Today’s careers are made and broken by one’s ability to network.
Please don’t post comments about how unfair this is — I know that people who are bad at networking think it’s not fair that the world rewards networking so much. But that’s the way the world is. You’re not going to change it by whining.
Instead, be giddy: Networking is actually a lot easier than you think. Here are five reasons why:
1. You don’t have to be a manipulator.
Networking is about being nice. It’s about figuring out what someone needs, and determining how to help him get it. Be aware of what people are trying to accomplish in their lives so that you can help them reach their goals — either by helping them yourself or putting them in touch with someone who can help them.
People who are ineffective at networking think you have to manipulate people to get what you want. These are the same people who fail at office politics because they don’t understand that office politics is about being nice. Networking is what you do when you’re doing office politics well.
Networking is about adding value to peoples’ lives. If you do that as much as you can, people will be happy to help you. Be generous with your time and energy as well as your contacts.
You should understand what you have to give, and then look for people who need it. Not only is that the place where you can add a lot of value, but those are also the people who likely have skills and connections that you don’t have, so they’ll be able to help you. The more diverse a group of people you can help, the more diverse the type of help you can get.
2. You don’t have to be funny and clever.
The people who are most afraid of networking think they have to open up a conversation with something really smart or witty. You don’t have to be either of those. The best way to start a conversation is by being nice.
If you pontificate on your brilliant ideas you’ll seem smart, but you won’t necessarily connect with people. And if you tell a lot of jokes you’ll seem funny, but that, also, is not necessarily inviting more conversation. Being nice, though, makes people want to talk. By being nice, you’re saying, “I’m safe to talk to. I’ll listen.”
People want to be listened to, and they want to feel interesting. So you can be good at networking by caring about other people. And you can’t fake being interested — it’s almost impossible. That means you have to genuinely care about other people.
The best networkers understand that everyone is interesting if you ask the right questions. So ask someone an open-ended question, figure out what they’re interested in, and ask them about that.
Your job is to discover what you can learn from people, and you can learn something from everyone. If you really try, you’ll be genuinely interested in what they have to say.
3. You don’t have to network when you’re job-hunting.
Don’t talk to me about job hunters who are networking. Let’s be real: When you need a job, you’re not networking, you’re calling in favors. You’re asking people for jobs.
Networking is something you do when you’re feeling great about your work. After all, who wants to network with someone who either hates her job or doesn’t have one?
This is how networking works to get a job — you make friends. Real friends. Not like the 46,000 “friends” Barack Obama has on MySpace, but the kind of friends to whom you’ve revealed something significant about yourself, and who have revealed something significant about themselves to you.
If you have 30 such people in your life who have diverse networks of their own, you’ll be able to get a job when you need one. So focus on making real connections with people instead of trolling the Internet for jobs. It’s not only a more effective use of your time, it’s a more fulfilling one.
(Wondering if you’re good at it this kind of job hunt? Test yourself.)
4. You don’t have to be agreeable.
Connecting with people doesn’t mean agreeing with them, it means growing with them. Personal growth is one of the best things you can get from a relationship. So it’s fine to disagree with someone you’re getting to know. You send the signal that you’re the type of person who challenges friends to think more clearly. Just be sure to disagree in a non-confrontational way.
A couple of weeks ago I met Annalee Newitz, editor of the book “She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff.” In the short amount of time we spent together, we managed to disagree on a lot. For example, on the question of whether little girls’ affinity for pink is an issue of nature or nurture (I say nature).
But I liked Annalee. She was easy to talk to and full of energy. That we could disagree on a wide range of topics means that we both think about the same wide range of topics.
So don’t assume that networking requires you to agree with everything someone says. It just requires you to care about what the person says. Caring is how you make a connection.
5. You don’t have to get off the sofa.
Here’s a big secret about the blogosphere: The people who are blogging seriously aren’t college kids writing about beer parties. In fact, college kids are generally mystified as to why someone would spend four hours a day writing a blog entry.
That’s because the serious bloggers are professionals, and they’re investing four hours a day on their blog because it’s an incredibly effective and efficient networking tool.
If you want to start a blog, here are some quick and easy steps to get started. But most of you won’t click that link, because blogging is, after all, a big commitment.
Nevertheless, most of you can leverage the blogosphere to do your networking in a way that never requires you to leave your computer. Instead, you can comment on other peoples’ blogs.
This is a very effective way to meet people who wouldn’t normally give you the time of day. For example, companies like Yahoo! and Sun have thousands of blogging employees, and CEOs of small startups often blog as well.
Liz Strauss explains on The Blog Herald that many bloggers focus primarily on building relationships. So find people you admire who blog, and start reading their blog every day. Leave intelligent comments. Most bloggers know the people who leave thoughtful comments on a regular basis. And bloggers like to help people in their blog community.
So you can sit on your sofa and surf all night, typing your opinion on your favorite topics. And after that, you can call yourself a great networker.
I had a career coach. I got the coach the day after a meeting where I was the only woman and the only person under thirty. My boss said, “You need more polish. You need a career coach.” I thought, “Great, my boss is going to pay to help me to fit in with the 50-year-old men at the top of my corporate ladder.”
The coach asked me a slew of seemingly innocuous questions about myself, and then she trailed me at the office for a few days. Her conclusion: I needed to act more professionally. I was surprised — I had read every book I could find on managing one's image at work. I wore earrings because all the women in Fortune magazine's 50-most-powerful-women list wear earrings. I kept my hands folded on the table in the same way that experts on news television do. I was surprised that I had missed something.
The coach gave me a list of things to change. When I walked, for example, I walked “high”, with a bounce, and didn't give off a sense of being grounded. She told me to look at the CEO: “He has a deliberate, grounded walk — no bounce. It instills confidence.” She told me I smiled too much. “It's a common problem for women,” she told me. “Women want to establish rapport by smiling, but men interpret a lot of smiles as either nervous or giddy.”
Lest she say that I also needed to work on accepting criticism, I thanked her for her help. After weeks of practice — and her trailing me the whole way — I made the changes. The coach collected her thousands of dollars in fees and left with a feeling of accomplishment.
But she left me feeling like a fake. I wanted to go back to regular me, but my boss kept telling me how much more professional I was, and I didn't want to disappoint the guy who was responsible for my next raise.
I started losing sleep, falling victim to my overactive imagination where my direct reports go out to lunch and talk about how fake I am, then they stop listening to me, and my office becomes Mutiny on the Bounty with an ending where I walk the plank to unemployment.
So I did what most people do when they can't sleep for months: I went to a psychologist. And it took the psychologist about twenty minutes to help me realize that I was uncomfortable with the level of authority I held. I had moved up the ladder very fast. I was managing a team of people much older than I was. My smiles and my bounce belied my discomfort.
I worked with the psychologist to feel more comfortable with my own authority, and after a few months, the solid gait and serious face came naturally to me. I didn't have to project a fake image because the image I was supposed to project — authority — felt right to me.
My psychologist helped a lot, but a psychologist is likely to miss the quirks of corporate life (after all, she has built a career by avoiding the corporate ladder). And the career coach is likely to miss the psychology driving you to do what you do. So if you find that your career coach makes recommendations that are hard to handle, hire a psychologist. After all, the more people who are helping you to get what you want in your career, the more likely you are to get it. And your money spent will come back to you later, as you gain more self-knowlege in and out of the workplace.
By Bruce Tulgan — Forget the idea of being a hands-off manager. That doesn’t help anyone. In the early 90s it became popular for managers to not manage. Today’s mangers need to reverse the trend.
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Today people talk very loudly about how they want a job that lets them have a life outside of work. That’s smart, of course, because there’s a long list of scientifically proven benefits to your health and happiness that friendship brings. And this includes the findings of Gallup pollster Tim Rath that you are almost guaranteed to like your job if you have a real friend at work.
But part of the idea of having a full, well-rounded life, is that you have close friends who are not family or a significant other. That’s right. The family and signifcant others don’t count when we talk about the benefits of friendship, even if you are really close to those people.
But making close friends is hard. We are meeting more people online, and we’re meeting a lot of people through travel, but we are more frenetic than ever in how we live our lives. Time magazine reports (under the heading “Loneliness”) that, “The number we count among our closest friends — the ones with whom we discuss important matters — shrank over the past 20 years, from three friends to two. At the same time, the number of Americans who have no one at all to confide in more than doubled, to 1 in 4.”
So let’s agree on what friends are, because I have a feeling that a lot of people don’t have them. Here is what I think is the minimum for a close friend is:
1. You have been friends with the person when you were not professionally involved with the person.
2. The person knows the part of yourself you dislike the most.
3. The person returns your calls in 48 hours.
If you don’t have friends, but you think you have a good job, you probably have one or all of these problems:
1. You have a job that doesn’t allow you enough time to have friends.
2. You are mistaking work associates for friends.
3. You have no idea how to manage your time.
If your wife or girlfriend picks all your friends, they are not your friends. They are hers and she lets you tag along. If you talk about your husband’s job or your boyfriends dissertation with all your friends, you can bet that your so-called friends are not particularly interested in your life. Or you’re not. Either way, such talk is a barrier to friendship. I use gender here loosely — it could be reversed. Relationship incompetence is not gender specific.
And one more thing, you cannot be true friends with someone who you have power or authority over. If you only hang around people who you have some sort of authority over then you have a problem relating to people as equals.
Maybe you are saying to yourself that it’s a time issue. First of all. I don’t believe you. It’s a priority issue. Because you have time to watch TV. Time to work overtime. Time to hang out with people who are not friends. But, even if it is a time issue, there is very little you can do with two hours once a month that will have so much impact on your well being as talking to a friend.
So what can you do to get a close friend? Here are three things:
1. Look at the friends you have.
Concentrate less on developing new friends and more on improving the quality of the friendships you already have. This suggesetion is based on research by University of California psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, who says the quality of relationships has more to do with your happiness than anything else.
2. Go visit someone.
Have a face-to-face meeting with one of those friends you IM all the time but have never met. Visiting them just once can increase the value of the friendship significantly. The nonverbal information you get about a person from talking with them face to face can make you feel much closer, after just one time, according to reaserach by psychologist Edward Hallowell.
3. Change your personal patterns.
After a big life change, like graduating from college, getting a divorce or moving across country, how you make and grow friends will change. You can rely on the tried-and-true techniques of your old life, you need to figure out what will work now – who to target, when to talk, what technology is appropriate. If you are having trouble making friends, try new ways of doing it.
And that, actually, is a great way to solve most of your problems: Try a new way of doing it. Not suprisingly, it’s something that’s easier to do with input from a friend.
By Jason Warner — One of my direct reports told me I’m wearing VP shoes. Apparently, my Eccos are the most popular shoe brand among vice presidents at Google.
It’s not surprising that I dress like a VP. Because dressing like what you want to become is an important part of an overall career strategy. What surprises me is how many professionals don’t recognize this or simply choose to ignore it.
But it’s not as simple as dressing for success. This is one of those times where too much or too little can make all the difference. The key to dressing like that which you want to become is to only do it 75%. If you go overboard, you’ll distance yourself from your peers, which is why the discussion about VP shoes threw me. I never want to distance myself from the people on my team. You have to be careful about this.
Here are some guidelines you should follow.
1. Don’t look like you’re trying too hard.
It is part of our corporate culture that you don’t have to dress up to be serious, but the groups I support are sales and operations, and they all dress in a business casual. They wear nice slacks or khakis, nice shoes but they wear quality clothing. So I choose to dress like them and buy nice stuff. I try and invest in nice shoes and belts, and also nice quality shirts. You can get away with buying inexpensive pants — Dockers, for example.
2. Don’t put yourself on the wrong side of the middle.
I see lots of people screw this one up. They see that some of those above them dress casually, so then they choose to dress casually. If you choose to dress like those above you, aim for the right side of the bell curve and dress like the successful people. If everyone dresses casually, then you are on your own, but I’ve found that there’s usually at least a light correlation between the best dressers and the best performers.
3. Don’t dress more than 30% above your level.
Okay, so some of you can swing the Rolex watch in your first job out of college, and to you I say, “Great choice in parents”. For the rest of us, the fastest way to distance yourself from peers and those above you is to overdress the part. It creates awkwardness all the way around. The CEO doesn’t want to see you wearing the same watch she does, nor does your counterpart in the next cube who has been with the company twice as long as you. It’s okay to step it up a little, but show some restraint. It is best to be slightly more done out than your cube-mates.
After all of this, I do have to admit that my new career experience at Google (week six as I write this) has got me a little wrapped around the axle however, as the vast majority of Google employees simply wear jeans and t-shirts to work. And those really bad boots — I think they call them Uggs. So now I’m thinking I may have to adjust my strategy some in this new world of work that is filled with Generation Y.
On this, and my VP shoes, I will keep you posted.
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I tell people all the time to change their job if they don’t like it, and people tell me this is totally impractical advice. A lot of people write to me to say that my advice only applies to rich people. Or they tell me that single parents, families living paycheck to paycheck, people in debt, cannot use my advice.
I think these people are in denial. Of course, there are exceptions, but usually these people are really saying that the things they have in their current standard of living are more important than being happy in their job. That’s fine. But don’t complain that the advice doesn’t apply to you. It does. You choose to have an expensive lifestyle instead.
I want to tell you a short history of my financial life. It is so unstable that when I told my brothers that I was writing for Yahoo Finance, they thought it was a joke. And then they got concerned for me that Yahoo would find out the real me, and I’d lose my job.
My bank account looked very good when I was running my own companies. They were well funded, and I extracted a large salary from investors — on top of equity — because it used to be okay to do that. The year my husband and I moved to New York City, I earned more than $200,000.
I had never lived in New York City before. But I had seen photos of John and Carolyn Kennedy coming out of their Tribeca loft, and I figured that’s where I would live with my husband. It was a harsh reality when I discovered that our combined income would need to be in the millions in order to have a loft in Tribeca. So we moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn that was so small that I had to buy storage for all my books. And just about everything else, too.
Then the World Trade Center fell. I was there, and my being there changed me and my husband. We both realized we wanted kids right away, and we wanted to change careers: Bye-bye big paychecks.
My husband started volunteering at human rights organizations. I became a freelance writer and had a poverty-level income for New York City. Then we had a baby. I want to tell you that we lived off our savings for a while, but we didn’t. It lasted about nine months in New York City.
That’s when we realized we had to totally shift our lifestyle to accommodate our work choices. We made big decisions. We stopped being friends with people who couldn’t stop ordering $70 bottles of wine at dinner. We didn’t go to the beach because we didn’t have a car to get there, and besides, beach passes were too expensive.
Soon, we found ourselves making almost every decision based on money, and we didn’t want to live that way. So after a lot of research, we moved out of New York City. We moved to Madison, Wisconsin. I write a lot about how we chose Madison, but the bottom line is that we looked for the city with the lowest cost of living that we could be happy in. (Other runners-up, in case you’re interested: Minneapolis, Portland (Oregon), and Austin.)
Once we got to Madison, things changed. Money was not nearly such a big issue. We became more flexible, we have more freedom in our decision making. I’m not going to tell you that Madison is a bastion of culture and innovation. It’s not. But if you want to live in a bastion of culture and innovation, it’ll cost you. In personal flexibility.
If you want personal stability, flexibility to find fulfilling work, and meaningful personal relationships, that’s about as much as you can ask for in life. That’s a lot. All the other stuff is secondary. Great if you can get it, but not as important as this stuff. I am not positive, but I have a feeling that I do not need to live in a major city in order to get these three things.
If you want to have the ability to change careers and quit jobs you don’t like and try out new things, then you might need to make huge life decisions to accommodate that. I have friends in San Francisco who had only one kid so they could afford to keep their low-paying jobs. This is a big decision. I have friends who are moving from the center of Portland to the boondocks of Portland so they can afford for one of them to be a stay-at-home parent.
I’m not saying you have to live in rural Alabama or forgo having kids. I’m saying you need to be an adult, and realize that adults make big decisions. Things don’t just happen to you. You have power to decide what your life will be like.
And if you set your life up so you can’t change jobs, take personal responsibility for that. It didn’t just happen to you. You are making decisions about that.
Does this courtship sound familiar to you?
“We used Instant messenger a lot. But sometimes you just want to get away from your computer, so then we’d text. But fighting while you text is so tedious you may as well just get back on IM.”
This description is from Sandra Proulx, who maintained a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend for two years, before they moved in together in New Hampshire.
Their relationship reflects one of the big changes that millennials have brought to dating: The long-distance relationship. It’s becoming more and more mainstream as young people increasingly rejigger what it means to step out into adult life.
The trend starts before college, when young people are tied to technology, communicating with people all over the world, and making friends with people they’ve never met in person.
Then college comes, and the experience includes much more travel than it used to. Junior year abroad used to be the time to travel. Now there’s also a summer internship for most students, and many students travel to another state every summer for a coveted internship of one sort or another. Among college students 78% say they have been in a long-distance relationship.
After that, traveling for a job seems normal. Thirty years ago, people would generally look for a job out of college in a city they wanted to build a life in. Today, the first job is just a first step.
And millenniels are experimenters. They see their twenties as a time to try out a bunch of different jobs, and they also see it as a time to try out a bunch of different cities. It used to be that you could tell where someone was living by the area code on their phone. Now that area code on their cell phone only tells you where they started.
Additionally, millenniels are acutely aware of the problems generation X encountered from putting off having children. Baby-boomers mothers told gen-X daughters: “Don’t worry about getting married, you have time. Focus on your career. You can have kids later.”
Now we have a whole industry of women penning their ordeal of trying to get pregnant. And it’s pretty clear that IVF is not something that makes putting off having kids til age 40 something to plan for.
So the typical gen-Y graduate plans on being married around age thirty. Which means that while he or she is gallivanting from job to job and city to city, there is also, a parallel hunt for a stable partner.
Enter the long-distance romance.
To be sure, not everyone likes doing the long-distance routine, and New Kid on the Hallway lays out a lot of reasons why. But anecdotal evidence suggests that long-distance relationships have become mainstream for people not only in college, but after college. And, in fact, when it comes to making two careers and one relationship work across state lines, there are some best practices. Here are three:
1. Have a plan for being together eventually, and be flexible.
Ben Morris, founder of Boston Pedicab, spent a semester of school in San Diego where he met his girlfriend, Carolyn Soohoo. Two months after meeting her, he went back to Northeastern to finish college, they agreed to maintain a long-distance relationship while Morris finished school and then, he’d move to San Diego.
Knowing that they had a plan to be together made them committed to daily, hour-long phone calls. “It’s not like you can kill an hour together watching TV,” says Soohoo, “in order to be together we had to be talking.”
But before he got to San Diego, he founded Boston Pedicab, and Soohoo ended up coming to Boston instead. It was a big move for Soohoo. But she points out that learning to live together was not that hard because she and Morriss knew each other very well, “Because of the distance, we were forced to talk about things that would come up a lot later in other relationships.”
2. Get comfortable with deep conversation that flows electronically.
The ubiquitous Blackberrry is evidence that technology has allowed people to blur the lines of work life and personal life. And the better you can use technology the more you can blur the lines. For example, Twitter – technology to update people about what you’re doing all the time — makes IM look like low-maintenance communication. And if you’re good with a wiki then collaboration with people you can’t see doesn’t seem that hard.
Much of the technology that makes the workplace telecommuter-friendly to young people makes a telecommuter relationship possible as well. And, perhaps the most surprising thing is that these relationships seem to work out.
Proulx says that a lot of their communication took place within the 160-character limit of a text message. “When you only see the person once a month, you figure out how to write a whole novel’s worth of information in 160 characters.”
3. Be honest with yourself when it’s going nowhere.
Elina Furman is the author of the new book Kiss and Run: The Single, Picky, and Indecisive Girl’s Guide to Overcoming Her Fear of Commitment. Not surprisingly, she has experience with long-distance relationships.
But hers lasted five years, but it didn’t really go anywhere. “I thought it was the best thing in the world. But I was much less committed than I realized. The long-distance allowed me to gloss over issues and keep a safe distance without ever having to commit.”
Not that all dead-end relationships are bad. Furman is the first to say that having a boyfriend who was generally out of the picture probably helped her career: “I had the security of the relationship without the responsibilities of a relationship, and that freed me up to concentrate on my career.”
But as she got closer to age thirty, she got more interested in the idea of settling down. And in hindsight she recommends that you ask yourself: “Are you making a plan for living in the same zip code, or are you just coasting?”
Either is fine, but the key to success – in both the long-distance relationship as well as the careers it accommodates – is to know what you are aiming for so that you can ask yourself if you’re getting it.
The transition from the end of school to the beginning of adulthood is very hard. Today that transition lasts longer than it used to, because there are so many choices and so few tried and true career paths — if any — that work anymore.
Here are five things to keep in mind to make the transition into adulthood a litte easier:
1. Don’t expect things to fall into place too soon.
Today most people use their twenties as a time to search, and then settle down around age thirty. It’s a smart thing to do given the wide range of choices there are for young people today. It’s a great idea to use your twenties to explore — as long as you don’t berate yourself for not knowing what you’re doing. In fact, it’s only a very small percentage of college graduates who know what they are doing with their lives when they graduate. Most start figuring it out when they leave college.
2. Take some risks.
Maybe you’ll move a bunch of times before you figure out the place that will make you most happy. And you’ll probably change jobs three or four times to find something you like. Exploration is common — in a wide range of arenas — and smart. It’s the only way to really know what you like, and this is the time to do it. When you are living in a dump and you hate your job, you can reframe your situation in a way that acknowledges that you are a living in a time where you are trying things to see what works – nothing is permanent and you learn from bad choices.
3. Lookout for depression.
One of the demographic groups at highest risk for depression are people in their early twenties. This is because the transition to adulthood is so difficult. And the time people often feel depression is about a year after graduation, when their work life turns out to be much less interesting than anticipated, and college friends are scattered geographically and making new friends is difficult. Depression is a treatable disease, if you get treatment. Depression is serious — it’s not a time to rely solely on friends and family. Call a professional.
4. Calm down about your debt.
Yes, young people today start out life with more debt than ever before, but this doesn’t have to be a road to disaster. Think in terms of workarounds. For example, most likely your version of the American dream is not about money, so you can fulfill your dreams while dealing with debt. And while you probably want to do work that fulfills you, you don’t have to starve doing that — CollegeSurfing Insider gives examples of how you can pair soul-filling work with good-paying work to find a career that will make you happy.
5. Surround yourself with mentors.
One of the most important indicators of how good you will be at getting what you want in adult life is how strong your network of mentors is. One of the Mentors can be a wide range of people. Your parents count. Your friends count. And your parents’ friends count. But you need to start roping them in early. Mentor relationships require cultivation, and the earlier you start the more support you’ll have getting through your twenties.
So what about Coachology? Hallie Crawford is a career coach who works a lot with young people who are just starting out in their work life. She is donating 90 minutes of coaching (over the phone) to help someone get themselves on track, in terms of where they want to go and how they can get there. You don’t need to set your path in stone, but it’s good to have some path in mind, even knowing that it will change. Hallie can help you find your path by understanding yourself a little bit better in terms of your career.
To get a better sense of Hallie’s ideas, check out her blog. To get free coaching from Hallie, send an email to me by Sunday, March 18, with three sentences describing what you’d like to get from working with Hallie.
A good way to think about the process of getting a job is that a resume gets you in the door, and an interview is where you close the deal.
Here are nine ways to ace an interview and get the job:
1. Tell good stories.
When someone says, “Tell me about yourself,” they don’t want to hear you rattle off a list of what you’ve done or what you’ve accomplished. People want stories. Stories are what make you stick in people’s minds.
The problem is, most people can’t figure out a story to tell about themselves, so they start listing facts. This is boring, and research shows that listing facts about ourselves instead of telling stories actually makes us feel disjointed — which is, of course, no good in an interview. Compelling stories make us believe in ourselves. So find a story arc to your career, and tell it during every interview.
2. Understand the behavioral interview.
When someone asks you a question that begins, “Tell me about a time when…” it’s a cue that you’re in a behavioral interview. There are established ways to answer this type of question.
The interviewer is trying to see how you acted in the past, which is a good predictor of how you’ll act in the future. You need to tell the interviewer about a situation you encountered, the action you took to solve the problem, and quantify the results. This is called the STAR response — Situation or Task, Action, Results.
3. Ask questions at the beginning, not the end.
Don’t wait until the end to ask good questions. What’s the point? You just spent the whole interview telling the person you’re right for the job — it’s a little late to be asking questions about the job, right? So ask your questions at the beginning. And then use the answers to better position yourself for the job during the interview.
At the end, when the interviewer says, Do you have any questions?” you can say, “No, I think I asked everything I needed to ask at the beginning of the interview. But thank you” instead of thinking of a pile of pseudo-questions
4. Stop stressing about your MySpace page.
Look, there’s nothing we can do about the fact that nearly every college kid is writing stupid things to his friend and posting it on MySpace or Facebook.
Hiring managers care less and less about these pages; it’s not earth-shattering news to human resources that college kids do stupid things. Which is lucky, because often, trying to clean up an online footprint is a lost cause.
So instead of worrying about what you did in the past, focus on what you’re doing now. Write articles online, or write a blog — do anything that will come up higher on Googlethan your prom date photo. Getting your ideas at the top of a search is the way to impress an interviewer. You want to get hired for your ideas, not your clean record on MySpace.
5. Explain away job hopping and long gaps.
It doesn’t matter what you do with your time as long as you’re doing productive, interesting things. So a gap is fine, as long as you can talk about what you learned, and how you grew during the gap. And job hopping is fine as long as you can show you made a significant, quantifiable contribution everywhere you went.
6. Present a plan.
Show the interviewer that you’ve done a bit of thinking about the company and the job. Brendon Connelly at Slacker Manager suggests that you go to the interview with a plan for the first three months you’re in the job.
Show some humility — say, “This is just something I came up with that we might use to get the interview started.” Of course, you can only do this if you know a lot about the job. But the best way to get the job is to know a lot about it.
7. Manage your parents.
It’s common today for parents to be involved in their twentysomething child’s job hunt. Parental involvement is so ubiquitous during interviews for summer internship programs that companies like Merrill Lynch will actually send an acceptance letter to a parent if the candidate requests one.
But some parents hover so close by that they make their kid look incompetent. Get help from your parents, but don’t get too much. Check out CollegeRecrutier.com to find out where your parents fall on the spectrum.
8. Play to stereotypes.
You’ll probably interview with more than one person. And each person you talk with will have some sort of personal agenda that will infiltrate your interview. Your job is to identify the type of person you’re talking to so that you can give the type of answer they’re looking for.
Understanding personality types will be helpful. But also take a look at Guy Kawasaki’s hilarious list of interviewer stereotypes and how to wow each type with your answers.
9. Practice. A lot.
An interview isn’t an improvisation — it’s a rehearsed performance. And it’s no mystery what the most common interview questions are, so prepare you answers. Even if you end up fielding a question you didn’t anticipate, surely a version of one the 50 answers you did prepare will work with the surprise question.
You can practice with a friend, or you can go back to your college counseling office, which will probably help you out no matter where you are in your career. But Alexandra Levit at Water Cooler Wisdom recommends using InterviewTrue to practice on video.