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.
A lot of readers ask me how to find a recruiter to help them find a job. In general, my answer is: Forget it. Headhunters don’t work for people who need jobs. Headhunters work for people who have jobs to fill.
The way this works is the hiring manager has a specific type of person he needs to hire, and that person is hard to find. The hiring manager cannot spend all the time it will take to locate this person, so the hiring manager pays a recruiter to find this special person.
“Few headhunters are in the talent management business,” says Terry Gallagher, of the search firm Battalia Winston International. “Most executive search firms only represent their client’s interests and executive staffing needs.” This means, recruiters start with a specific position to fill, not a specific candidate to employ.
Recruiters are expensive. Often 20% of someone’s starting salary. This is not peanuts. So you can be sure that companies do not hire recruiters to find people with general qualifications. General qualifications are easy to fill. If you are a generalist, there are lots of people like you.
So look, if you are entry level or you are changing careers, you are not going to be attractive to a recruiter. Entry level people do not have any special skill that would make them fit a job that retained recruiters get hired to fill. And people changing careers do not have specific skills in their new career, they have specific skills (at best) in their old career.
Headhunters don’t work with career changers. Headhunters work with superstars. And maybe not always superstars, but the less star power you have, the more of a specialty you have to have. Are you the only person in the world who knows how to build an inventory system like Wal-Mart has? Call a recruiter. Are you the number-one salesperson in all of Yahoo? Call a recruiter.
But the thing is that those people don’t need to call recruiters. Recruiters call them all the time. Recruiters know who the amazingly talented are. It is no mystery. So if you want to get on recruiter radar, you need to focus on making yourself look amazingly talented — in a proven-track-record way, not in a my-mom-says-so way.
If you think you are at place in your career where a recruiter would be interested, Michael Keleman at Recruiting Animal says, “Do a search of recruiters on LinkedIn. There are zillions of them there and some might indicate that they are in your area. Contact them and ask if they work with candidates like you. You don’t have to contact them through LinkedIn, just call.”
If you’ve got great experience, you might get special treatment from the recruiter. Recruiter David Perry, for example, has been known to represent candidates like they are movie stars. But most of the time, Keleman says, “You resume will go into a database until a company hires the recruiter for a seach you’re suited for.”
So go ahead and try getting a recruiter’s attention. But focus more on networking on your own, and doing great work, because those are the keys to getting good job opportunities.
By Bruce Tulgan — Sometimes people who make insane demands are actually giving you the clues to getting better work out of your team.
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Who makes the best salesperson? A cheerleader.
The drug industry is so systematic about recruiting cheerleaders that the New York Times writer Stephanie Saul wrote a feature about it, spotlighting women like Onya: “On Sundays she works the sidelines for the Washington Redskins. But weekdays find her urging gynecologists to prescribe a treatment for vaginal yeast infection.”
There are some suggestions that the cheerleaders became the substitute for the now-illegal freebies that drug companies used to give doctors (like trips to Tahiti). Now drug companies persuade doctors to prescribe drugs by lending them the presence of a hot salesgirl.
Lynn Williamson, the cheerleading coach at the Univeristy of Kentucky, says that it’s not just that the woman are dreamy. Williams thinks that cheerleading talent does, in fact, correleate with talent for sales: “Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm – they learn those things, and they can get people to do what they want.”
Williamson is not alone. Spirited Sales is a recruiting firm that specializes in cheerleaders. Here’s a quote from their web site: “Spirited Sales Leaders has a database of thousands of self-confident, outgoing, responsible and enthusiastic young men and women from around the United States with varying levels of B2B sales experience.”
The web site also talks about how cheerleaders have a track record of leadership and success. This actually rings true to me. I mean, athletes are coveted by many recruiters because athletes do better in business than non-athletes. And cheerleaders are, in many aspects, just like these athletes; but cheerleaders, unlike athletes, are consistently outgoing and good-looking. And good looks give people an edge in business, as well.
So who’s the smartest hire you can make for your sales team? A cheerleader. As long as she can meet the demands of the job.
And what happens when the best girl for the job goes to work every day? She gets hit on. Constantly. And even when it’s not a direct hit, it’s a guy who is married and bored and not bored enough to cheat, but definitely bored enough to take too much face time from the salesperson while he’s making a purchasing decision.
Not convinced? According to the Times article, an informal survey showed that 12 of 13 medical saleswomen said they had been sexually harassed by physicians. And if you think it’s only physicians, you’re wrong. It’s even Hewlett-Packard board members.
So here is advice to women in sales:
1. It’s not your fault.
It is totally common to get hit on at work, especially if you are a cheerleader type. You are not provoking this behavior. You are being you, and men like you. Do not feel bad about this. And, definitely don’t wear dowdy clothes just becuase the men are hitting on you. Anyway, women who totally downplay their sexuality are seen as less competent.
2. Use it to your advantage.
Men who are attracted to you are more likely to buy from you. So what? Men who like to play golf are more likely to do business with other men who play golf. People have been given unfair preferences forever. Be glad you are the recipient of some of this. If the guy wants to talk with you for too long, fine, as long as he buys something. That’s what salespeople get paid to do: Connect with the customer and talk until they buy.
3. Don’t date someone who is married.
The truth is that the guys who will be most interested in you are the ones who are married. They are not going to leave their wife and kids. They just want something a little more interesting for a little bit. This is a waste of your time. This person is not emotionally available and he is a sponge for the fun, exciting, full-of-possibilities stage of life you are in. Don’t let him ruin it. Sell him something and leave.
4. Dating good dating material is fine.
If you are selling to a really good guy, and he’s single, dating him is fine. But then try to give his account to someone else on your team. Otherwise things get too messy.
5. Don’t put yourself in danger – from the guy or from human resources.
If the guy touches you and you don’t want it, tell him a clear no right away. Don’t worry about losing the sale. If, after you tell him no, he touches you again, leave and don’t go back. Ever. Do not tell human resources if you can help it. The job of human resources is to protect the company, not you, and when you have a harassment complaint, you are a problem to the company. This is not good news. I hate to have to tell it to you, but it’s true. Here are some ideas for what to do instead.
The good news, though, is that outgoing, good-looking women can have great careers in sales — or anywhere else they want to go. So go into the workforce with talent and ambition and create the life you want. Really.
By Jason Warner — I’ve been interviewing people for a very long time. Sometimes I think maybe too long. You have to go back to my very first recruiting job at Microsoft to understand. This was when Microsoft was The Place to Work in the Technology World, circa the mid 1990s.
In this well-defined and very measured job, my objective was to interview candidates 7 hours a day via the telephone. Sometimes it was 8 or 9 hours a day, but on average it was 35, one-hour phone interviews per week, for an average of 7 hours a day. Because of this experience, I’m pretty sure that the limit of human capabilities when it comes to interviewing is an average of 7 hours a day. Anything more is perhaps dangerous.
Now, most professional recruiters would call this phone-screen-Hell. I suspect many of the candidates may have felt that way also, come to think of it. In essence, I would sit at my computer, headset perched on one ear, and interview until late in the day at which point my brain began to melt, all while tapping furiously on my keyboard to take notes.
I did this job for approximately 18 months, which is pretty remarkable given how tedious it was. By my math, I did approximately two-thousand, six-hundred and twenty five interviews during this part of my career (and I’ve done probably half that many again since). That is a lot of interviews. So I got pretty good at it.
One of the things I learned during that time was to structure behaviour interview questions, so I could determine what a candidate’s competencies were. These competencies have names like “Interpersonal Savvy” and “Planning and Organizing” and “Drive for Results” and the theory is that they are supported by behavioural examples – times in a candidate’s life when they’ve demonstrated behaviors which reflect these competencies.
Lest I bore you with HR theory and practice, what I’m getting at is that knowing how interviews are done will make you a better candidate, and one of the keys to any interview is structuring your answers correctly. I’d say less than 3% of all candidates frame up their answers in this way, and the ones who do really stand out. That should be you.
Not every question will be best suited to this approach, but it works well on any of the questions that start with phrasing like, “Tell me about a time when…”. I know, you hate those questions. But here is how to answer them.
Many of the questions you are asked can be answered using a 4-part sequencing to your answer. An easy way to remember this is an acronym called SARI, and it stands for Situation, Action, Result, and Interesting Features. You can remember it by considering if you don’t learn this interview technique you may be SARI.
So, let’s say that the question is, “Tell me about a time that demonstrates your leadership capabilities…” You should structure your answer like this:
Situation: Explain the situation in a way that gives the interviewer context. Less detail is better, but give enough detail to paint the picture.
So, in our example, you might say, “I was transferred into a new department at work, and had to take on a whole new team. One of the key factors was that morale was really low because the department was not resourced properly and turnover had spiked.”
Action: Here is where you explain what you did. Note that I said you, not we. Referring to the action in terms of the intangible “we” is one of the most common interview mistakes I see. You are the one interviewing, so your answer should describe specific behaviors that you actually did.
In our example, you would say, “So the first thing I did was to schedule 1:1 meetings with everyone, to really understand what the issues were, and what was troubling with the team. I also asked them what they thought I should I do, and what the biggest challenge was that each of them faced. I then followed up with everyone as a group. And the most important step I took was I took action quickly against the issue that was causing the team the most grief…”
Result: Here’s where you share the net result to the business. You should quantify this with numbers or other business metrics, even if they are fudged or fuzzy. It probably goes without saying, but always try to pick an example where the net result was positive. (Hey, you wouldn’t believe the things I’ve heard.)
In our example, something like this, “The net result of my leadership actions was that morale was significantly improved after 60 days – you could just feel the energy in the department. Most importantly, we reduced turnover from 40% annualized to zero during the first 6 months…”
Interesting Features: This where you tell the interviewer something special and/or memorable about the story, so that they really remember it. If you can, tie it back to competencies to strengthen your answer.
“I think this example really demonstrates a servant-leader approach to generating business results. In fact, my team still talks about the turnaround today. I am proud of this example because I think it demonstrates strong leadership.”
So, by now you are probably thinking, “This is great, Jason, but there’s no way I am ever going to remember all this in the middle of an interview…” And you are right, unless you practice.
This is easy to practice. Simply have a friend or your significant other ask you a few “Tell me about a time when…” questions and then practice answering them using the 4-part sequence SARI.
After just a few questions, it will become second nature.
The reason I know so much about being late is because recently, I have been late a lot. So I have been telling myself that each time I am late I have to honestly think about what sort of behavior is causing me to be late, and write it down.
The write it down part is important. For me, writing something makes it more serious. Like I am taking more responsibility for changing something if I write it down. I know I am not alone in this.
I see blogs about losing weight and sticking to a budget, and those people say that blogging about it helps them stick to a plan. I think being on time is a similar type of goal in that you have to think about it every day in order to make a real change in your life.
Hopefully I will not end up writing a whole blog about being on time, especially since there’s such a good one already. Hopefully a post will be enough to get things back in order….
Here are things I’ve come up with for myself:
1. Schedule the event into your calendar.
If you block out time to be somewhere then you won’t be doing something else when it’s time to go. I amazed myself when I tried to do this. I discovered I had enough on my schedule to last 48 hours a day. It would have been impossible for me to be on time for anything.
(Note: If you are a person who is about to recommend to me that I read Getting Things Done in order to be better at time management, here is a link you might like.)
2. Practice saying what you need to say.
Here’s a great thing to say: “Excuse me, I hate to cut you off, but I have an appointment.” It is hard to cut someone off, but they will respect you for sticking to a schedule. The higher up you go in corporate life, the stricter the people stick to a schedule. The good news is that this means it’s perfectly acceptable in work life to say this short speech. Get comfortable doing it at work and then you can do it at home, too. Often saying no takes forethought and practice.
3. Be a time pessimist.
Assume everything will take a little longer than your first estimate. This will either make you right on time for everything, or it’ll make you a little early. People who run early are calm, organized, and always ready. Not a bad place to be.
4. Prioritize.
Some people are late because they simply don’t have enough time to do everything. The only way to change this is to stop doing so much. Face the reality that you cannot get your whole list done. Figure out what’s most important and just get that done. Tell the people who depend on you – like your boss — that you can only do what you have time for, and things at the bottom of the their list of priorities will not get done: a reality check for everyone in your life.
(Another Getting Things Done note: The only people I know who are really good at prioritizing have read the book. Here’s an overview of the book for the uninitiated.)
5. Be honest with yourself.
Why do you let yourself be late? It is disrespectful and makes you look unorganized and out of control. Why are you not getting control over your time. So much about being on time is actually about self-knowledge. Often, we are scared to make the decisions that we must make in order to get control over our time and become someone who runs on schedule. But there is no other way to run a life. To run on schedule is to plan the life you want to live and execute that plan.
It turns out that young people are poised to significantly increase workplace productivity. But, before we get to that link, here are links to help us redefine age and rethink what engagement looks like at work.
1. Recompute your age
Here’s a new way to think about which generation you are part of: How many social media tools you use. Really.
Margaret Weigel, who manages research about media at MIT, introduced me to this idea, by way of commenting on this blog, and now I’m hooked. Weigel writes: “I mark generational differences by media use, not by age. There are gamers, there are bloggers, and then there are those who post every waking moment of their lives on FaceBook, YouTube, Flickr.”
This is a way to explain why people who are twenty years old and leaving voice mails all day are older than their age. It’s also a way to explain why I think of Obama as a gen-Xer. He has 48,000 friends on MySpace – double any of the other candidates for President.
2. Commitment is personal investment, not time investment
Sylvia Hewlett’s broad sweeping study showed that baby boomers are much more willing than younger people to put in excessively long hours at work. However Personnel Development International finds that hours spent working have no direct correlation to commitment to work: Generation X is actually more committed to their work than baby boomers.
(Maybe this is because Gen X job hopped more and job hopping leads to more passion and more passion leads to more engagement at work.)
3. Collaboration is the next frontier of productivity
Ironically, the baby boomers are the ones who have done all the research about how important and effective teams are, but the baby boomers generally don’t like working in teams. My favorite link of this week is from Mike Griffiths at Leading Answers about the wide-reaching data about how incredibly collaborative young people are at work.
It looks like the real productivity is not going to come from hours spent working, which is how the older people in Hewlett’s study think of productivity. But from the collaborating tools and the people who use them intuitively.
What to do with all this? Companies should make sure that people who don’t understand collaboration get out of the way in the workplace.
Knowledge workers can spend about 40% of their day on email, not just reading and replying, but also searching for an email they want to reference. So it makes sense that we are always looking for ideas to make dealing with email faster.
Here’s one: Get a coach.
The three biggest problems with email are: There’s too much, the quality is low, and we don’t share best practices. Mike Song is an email coach, and author of The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your Email Before it Manages You. He spends his days teaching people to overcome these problems.
For example, if you improve quality you get fewer emails back looking for clarification. Here are some ways to write higher quality emails:
1. Write a better subject.
Tell people what kind of mail it is by using descriptions at the front such as: action, info, request, confirmed, or delivery, as in, “Delivery: Bio you requested.”
2. Put the whole message in the subject line.
If it’s short, then the person won’t have to even open the email. But you need to tell someone that the message ends in the subject line, so try marking the end of the message with something like this /EOM
3. Structure the body of your message well.
People are not reading whole messages. They are scanning. If it’s a longer email, put a quick summary up top, and if there is an action required, summarize the action up top. Also, use bullets to describe the background. This will be easier for someone to scan and it will force you to be more concise.
Mike coaches individuals and workplace teams on how to use email more effectively. He has worked with people at Pfizer, Hewlet Packard, and Capital One. What struck me was that he can typically save someone ten full days a year by making them more effective with email.
Some of this saved time comes from the fact that email affects everything you do, because so much of your daily diet of information comes via email. So his recommendations go beyond just the email message itself.
For example, people waste a lot of time looking for information. (I do this, by the way. I had a file of links to use when I wrote about email. Where are they? I don’t know. It took me ten minutes just to find this one at TechDirt.)
Mike describes my problem on the nose: “People have a lot of overlap in terms of the folders they use and then people can’t remember where they put something.”
So I asked him what to do. He recommended just four categories. Which I confess makes me nervous, but I can’t say that my current system of ten thousand folders is working very well…
Okay. So here are the details of the free coaching:
Two different people will get email coaching sessions with Mike. A session lasts about three hours. But (this is sort of a big but) he is going to do it at your company, so you have to be in Connecticut, New York City or Boston to get free coaching from Mike.
Here are some other things. He wants to coach your team – so that you all learn to send email to each other better. Mike says that most people are totally annoyed by each others’ email quirks, and you can decrease a lot of time spent on email by getting teams to work together to send better emails. And, one more thing, any size team is okay, but your team needs to be using Outlook.
If you want to get this free training for you and your team, send an email to me by Sunday, March 11.
Today’s the big day that I announce my book. It’s not out yet. Not until May 22. But today is the day I put the photo of the book cover on the blog and tell you that you should pre-order the book. Yes. Please do that.
But what I’m really going to do today is tell you about career change. Because that’s what I did when I wrote this book. It wasn’t the kind of career change where I was a ballerina one day and a construction worker the next. I mean, I had been writing a weekly column for five years. So writing a book shouldn’t be a stretch after that.
But in fact it was a big stretch. Writing a book is very different from writing a column, and that was a problem.
After five years as a columnist, I was pretty confident in my ability to turn out a career tip in 600 words. So I waited until a month before the book was due, locked myself in a room, and threw together a book. Then I danced around my New York City apartment crowing about my brilliant authorship. For about four days. Until my editor got back to me with a hand-delivered letter that said, basically: This manuscript sucks.
So, maybe you think if you got that letter, you would immediately hunker down and fix things. But that’s was not so easy to do. I was used to my editors telling me how great my column is. How popular it is. How funny I am. You get used to being really good at something and you don’t really want to hear anything else. It’s hard to start over at something and be just a beginner.
So I spent about four months whining to my agent and saying I write how I write and I’m not changing it to pander to some editor and I think I’m just going to get a corporate job. I said that a lot – like, maybe twenty times.
This is what change looks like: kicking and screaming. Because change when everything is terrible looks like a great idea. But when things are going pretty well, change looks too hard.
The thing is that every time I imagined myself not writing this book, and going back to a corporate job, I got sad. I love writing so much, and I feel so lucky to be able to do this for my work. So, one day, when I was whining and complaining, my agent told me that if I didn’t write the book the way the publisher wanted they were going to dump me.
That was sobering. I did not want to be dumped. I didn’t want to go down in the book world because I was stubborn and difficult to work with. So I decided to write the book the way my editor wanted.
My editor, Diana Baroni, is good. She realized that I was being stubborn because I was scared to have to learn how to do something new. She was patient with me, and she even gave me an extra year to write the book.
Yep. You read that right. My book was a year late because that’s how much extra time I took to decide that I was going to learn to do something new. But it will come as no surprise to you that it was a great learning experience.
One of the biggest differences between writing a book and writing a column is that a book has to have a Big Idea. So the big idea for my book is that the new generation has ushered in a new workplace, and the old rules don’t apply. If you’ve been reading my blog regularly, you’ll know that I write about this all the time. But in the book, it’s very organized.
Before I got my book contract, I didn’t really write about big ideas. The process of writing the book taught me how to think bigger. And, of course, Diana was very good at keeping me from writing a lot that is just about my life and only tangentially giving career advice. (Like this post, for example.)
So look, next time someone wants you to change what you’re doing, and you think it’s just a bunch of extra work because what you’re doing is fine, think about my book. How much it taught me about how to think bigger, and differently, and broaden the range of hurdles I can approach. You can do the same. If you can be humble enough to be a beginner again.
By Bruce Tulgan — We know that writing stuff down helps us remember. But we don’t do it all the times that we should. Here are the ideas that will cause you to write down more, and writing down more will help you do a better job.
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