Interview Red Flags

The Interview (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Danger, Will Robinson! This could be a bad employee!

It’s time to hop back into the discussion about the interview. It is a given that the seeker is at the place where candidates are in process of being chosen to compete in the great arena–the interview(s) and the seeker is one of the chosen.  After all, this is what all the hub-bub is about, bub: being one of those too big to pass through the “coarse sieves” of the “first cattle call selections” . Now the finer sieves come out.

Company and independent  recruiters give the thumbs down on the following  ”red flag” parade of behaviors–things that make a candidate look like a potential bad hire–in interviews. This list is a compilation of all the red flag behaviors I have learned to avoid. This wisdom is  collected from seminars, recruiters, online articles and many job searches. Of course, lack of contact information on the resume or an email address like, “honeylocust.com” reduces the chances of being called into the arena to zero!

Applicant States of Being

Did I really say THAT

• currently unemployed
• Mature worker
• Worker of different gender, race, color or weight than expected
• arriving for interview late
• disorganized
•  inappropriate attire
• out-of date appearance
• smoke/alcohol on breath
• perfume/cologne
• Lack of preparation
• nervousness
• over confidence/over familiarity
• desperation
•  negative attitude
• low energy

From a Quick Look At the Resume

• Out of date resume
• Mature candidate
• Pure functional resume
• long gaps between jobs termination(s)
• unstable job history -  “job hopping”
• social media reputation
• overqualified (setting your bar too low)

hauling emotional baggage into the interview

Don’t Ask, Don’t Reveal?

• Prison terms
• mental illness hospitalization
• “Monk”-isms
• conditions and health issues
• Child/Adult care issues

Yes, it might take a few posts to get through all of these, but I feel it well worth the time.

Related articles

• Do You Really Want To Know What My Real Weaknesses Are? (victoree.wordpress.com)
• 7 Steps to Finding & Hiring the Best Employees for Your Company (grasshopper.com)
• Not Being Offered a Job is Not a Personal Rejection (hiringlibrarians.com)
• Recruiters Look at Resumes for 6 Seconds; Here’s How to Impress Them (bostinno.com)
• The Horror of the Resume (jamkib.wordpress.com)

Notes From A Bad Teacher About Education Careers

Education Calculator on Notebook (Photo credit: nniknak)

Some people seriously consider going into education as their “encore career“.

Let me whisper something in your ear: fuggedabowdit.

Ask me what prompts that venomous phrase. I want to do my part in strengthening education by preventing one more idealistic, romantic  person with the wrong personality configuration from becoming one of the 50% of educators who leave the profession in the first five years of practice (and head off some chocolate OD’s and soggy-pillow-at-3am moments).

Yes, truly monstrous people continue to slip through the cracks and end up in education  judging from some of the  lurid stories in the news these days about abusive teachers. However, this is not that kind of discussion. This is intended  to influence people who ought not teach lower school grades to put the cap back on the pen before the application gets filed to any system anywhere. This is about the “rightness of fit” issue in the job search. I am lifting the example of early education because it is what I know, but the lessons can be widely applied to jobs anywhere:

when you don’t belong somewhere, you don’t belong. Move on.

In earlier posts this year there is a discussion about discovering the most appropriate place of employment. I collected the discussion in the section of the blog, “Victoree’s Shape-Shifting Job Gypsy Card Game”. Click on the tab  to review.

While re-doing my MBTI assessment with a professional counselor it finally dawned on me why I had so little success as an early educator. Education systems, like many other companies, slide up and down the scale of being candid about  fully disclosing why an employee “didn’t work out”. It seems companies rather go to great lengths to couch  bad comments on the “final report card” in vague terms, probably to deflect a possible wrongful termination/discrimination lawsuit.

The truth surfaced for me in cross referencing the results and finding several of the same traits  surfacing across several assessments, including the MBTI, skills, and strengthfinder2.0.  I came to the conclusion that I am basically unsuited for the lower school classroom. No shame.

The release of that shame felt like finally being able to wear a pair of jeans one size smaller. Releasing the shame might even make my dream of shopping in that lower-sized section come true! (You know stress makes you fat, don’t you?) I made a cowardly decision to look for “job security” and “normalcy” early in the job search and ended up in a place where I did not belong.

Wherever the ”ah ha” breaks through,early or late in the job search, give yourself a gift and let the revelation “work you”.

Related articles

• Relationship Between MBTI Type and Religious Preference (drdianehamilton.wordpress.com)
• Indeed increases job search traffic lead (indeed.com)
• How to Become a Teacher (answers.com)
• CAPT Training Programs Approved for Continuing Education in Professional Licensing, Qualification, and Certification (prweb.com)

Just Being Me: “Default Activity”

a featured illustration from Shay's Word Garden on Blogspot

Some people actually cannot imagine themselves alive on earth having nowhere to go every day that promises a monetary reward at the end of a week. It was from graduation to first job. No space between. It is simply mind-boggling for some folk to consider there could possibly be other places to be during the day and none of them involve parking on the living room sofa watching daytime TV.  ”Being me” happens in the spaces not filled up by “the job”. Satisfying the need for a more meaningful life while having a low-paid, boring job causes this space.”Disassociation” from a former job will open more of this space too.

When I'm not working, I'm at...

Let’s play a game.Pretend suddenly you flew off to your favorite place to be; the place that could be called your “second address”…a place where if anybody goes there, they would find you. Are you there? Answer me honestly from where you are hiding. MARCO!

Who said, “POLO!”?

Found you. I know where you are. After the initial drama of joblessness, what might begin to happen is a rediscovery of joyful activity engaged in before there was any thought about paid employment. I call that “default activity”. For some, this kind of activity is laced up tightly into weekends and often called, “hobbies”. For others, it is what one naturally turns to when the day is over. It is what people do to “decompress” or “unwind”. Another word for it is “pastime activity”. Some people take chunks of time to do special projects like teaching kids to read in another country. Still others are gaming, treasure hunting, cooking, painting, sitting in front of the fridge inhaling more than the fragrance or on the dock of the bay “watching the tide roll away”. Default activity. It comforts; it relaxes; it probably started in childhood and it is organic to the personality. After the six-month anniversary of joblessness, default activity might be just the ticket to realign the soul with  authentic purpose. Who knows where a default activity might lead? A business, ministry and yes, a new career, may suggest itself that way.

Off-Road Travel: Going Job Free

Your response?

Some of us are “4-wheel-drive” job seekers. Not really job seekers at all,  but “third alternative” folk. Here is what I am talking about–

What is the Third Alternative?

There is–

1. joining a larger interest to help them advance their collective purpose – otherwise called, “employee“
2. forming one of several configurations of  the corporation where an entrepreneur business owner becomes an employer, achieving the collective mission in concert with a group of (hopefully) like-minded folk.
3. becoming a one-person service provider – otherwise called, “independent contractor” promoting each client’s mission with select services.  This is “third alternative”.

Don’t quote me, but it seems that the farther beyond age 50 a worker is, the less likely a large business will take that worker on as a full-time new hire. Mature workers are often advised to apply for employee roles at smaller companies and to take temporary or part-time work. Others strike out on their own through franchising– “buying” themselves jobs, or establish small businesses outright–creating themselves jobs (and sometimes jobs for several more).

There are temporary independent contractors, people who write “self-employed” on Linked In profiles to gracefully cover gaps between employee roles or who start freelance enterprises with the intention of keeping them only until the next employee gig shows up. Noticeably, theatre people tend not to do that because there is no guilt associated with having parallel jobs and taking temporary jobs between shows.

I take requests

Ah, then there is a certain hardcore people called, “solopreneurs”–independent contractors who operate like bees in a clover field going  from corporation to corporation. They are there for keeps, not just until the next employee gig. These are the people who live the third alternative lifestyle.  Having no secret longing to be an employee, these are the gypsies of the economic world, and worthy of ballads.

Pardon my romantic rant. The truth is, a job is not the only way to make a living. People can and do make other choices.

Native Guides In the Job Free Wilderness Journey

http://www.barbarawinter.com (Joyfully Jobless)

http://www.startupnation.com (Start-up Nation)

http://www.marykay.com/company/companyfounder/default.aspx (founder, Mary Kay Ash)

http://www.avoncompany.com/aboutavon/history/mcconnell.html (David McConnell, founder Avon)

Mature Workers and The New Workplace

http://www.cio.com/article/30212/IT_Staffing_The_High_Price_of_Age_Discrimination?page=1&taxonomyId=3154

Related articles

• It’s A Thin Line…Employee vs (sherrihenley.wordpress.com)
• Two in Five Firms Use More Independent Contractors (prweb.com)
• temporary Help Wanted: Managing Contractors (forbes.com)
• Price of Reclassifying Workers (online.wsj.com)

A Consideration For Older Workers

Good question

Does it make sense for a non-employed worker 5 years away from retirement to prepare for a new occupation knowing that there is:

• no guarantee of a job after training is complete
• no  experience in the new occupation to display
• prejudice against older workers

Few sorrows in life beat being an employee in such an alienating job that she ends up in the hospital preferring death because of the stress. There are valid reasons to aspire to meaningful work where natural talents and passions will be applied to do the world, the company and the worker some good. However, a challenge presents itself to the worker who decides in the autumn of life, closer to traditional retirement, ”not to take it anymore” after years of  ”settling” or “scooting along the bottom” or waiting to be fired–again–. There remains the matter of proving possession of the requisite 3-5 years of experience.

This looks very much like the new graduate’s dilemma: how to get a job that requires you already have the experience when you must have had the job to get the experience? For students there are internships and apprenticeships to cover that “no experience” gap. Midlife job changers are now tapping into internships and experience building programs.

Few recruiters will ever touch that question.

Recruiters do not love dealing with the risk of career changers. After all, a recruiter cannot present a candidate who does not have the skill/experience package the company he represents asks for. Except for the “mavericks” in the field recruiters will be more comfortable with people who have non-messy histories in the same field/job as the potential new position.

Related articles

• Older workers / Productivity : Average age-productivity profile of individual workers is increasing until age 65 (skillsinfo.wordpress.com)
• ‘Employers are recruiting retired workers and finding that their work is exceptional’ (telegraph.co.uk)
• Generational issues ‘important for business insurance holders’ (premierlinedirect.co.uk)
• 9 Workplace Benefits That Need Improvement (money.usnews.com)

WHAT Career Path?

Turning things around and looking at them upside down. Nothing like it in

Come again?

the world. For instance: take another look at the idea of “career paths”. One favorite image is the “career ladder“. This evokes an arrangement of positions placed in vertical succession lowest to highest. The other favorite image is of a journey that begins at “point a” and ends at “point b” like Mapquest directions output. Notice how in each of these images the way is as straight as a gunshot going through a house in the projects–in through the front door and straight out through the back door because both doors are perfectly in line. Note also that the ladders always go “up” and the paths always go “ahead”.

I see denial of the real in these images. Neither of them acknowledges detours or potholes for goodness sake! Anyone who has ever traveled on any kind of conveyance public or private knows that delays, detours, washed out bridges, roads under repair, bumps, holes in the road, construction delays, closed exits and accidents along the way may arise in any trip. People get stuck in airports; get lost; pass their exits; arrive at the depot late; miss the train. None of the common things that happen in life is acknowledged in the so-called, “career path” or “career ladder” image of a working lifetime.

que?

Question: is there really such a thing as a “career path” or is that just a mythical /artificial social construct? I say it’s a mythical and artificial social construct; a bit of “wishery“. Do these ladders and paths always go up or ahead in a straight line? There seems to be a general assumption that they do. Here is the big one–what if the road traveled in a career lifetime is not a road at all? What if there is no real guarantee that it will go up?

Suppose the road is really a spiral or a helix? That would mean that there is some kind of central core and we live life circling around that central core in a spiraling progression. Work/career is but a series of knots on that helix revisited again and again. The direction may go up, move across or reverse in the opposite direction at any time in life.

missed the exit

In my short lifetime I have seen roads reduce to paths that get lost into the bush; streets with dead ends; wrong turns on the way to Piscataway, New Jersey that somehow end up in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Do potential employers or recruiters understand the same thing could happen with careers?

A Recruiter’s Nightmare Applicant

Recruiters' nightmare applicant

Job gypsies are a recruiter’s nightmare

I was feeling fine until I went to a seminar featuring a recruiter recently. There the point once again hit like a hammer that job gypsies are a recruiter’s nightmare. I did not even venture to shake the speaker’s hand afterward.

When time is not on your side

Let us sit down face to face with our pot of tea between us and talk about this reality.  Some of us would do well not to fight hard, but to fight smart. This is especially true when barriers such as spotty job histories stare us down in derision at our audacity to dream of victory over them.

We are seeing a groundswell of effort these days–revolts and new laws to push back at companies’ nonsense thinking about the long-term unemployed. People seek to change the rules of the game to make them fair to all the players, not just the dealers. Still, the changes will not reach everyone, especially the hardcore unemployed. Gainful employment for all is not important to corporations and the governments they diddle. Will not the poor always be with us?, they say. To them a certain percentage of unemployment is even acceptable.

Ah, dear. I'll never place this applicant!

Work smart, not hard

Companies pay recruiters to find them the best talent they can get and the qualifiers for “best talent” include tenure of service. There is a pervasive belief that a person who has changed jobs three times in five years is unstable and therefore undesirable for whatever the reason. No recruiter will tie this albatross around their neck.

Some of us, therefore, would do well to go with either self-guidance or a coach and forget about working with recruiters until  work history proves the applicant  a safe bet or the challenge is surmounted another way. In any case, a savvy  job seeker must have a convincing personal answer for the hard questions in this area a recruiter will certainly ask. We are going to talk about alternatives in the weeks to come.

In the springtime of life, in the 20′s, outliving a not-so-great job history has viable odds. However, for an applicant in the harvest time of life, at 35-plus, the odds become friendlier with the house. A mid-career job gypsy’s best bet, then, is to work smart. That means to have great marketing and be very well connected.

Victoree: True North And Expanding Horizons

Directions, please

A year or so ago this blog began as a kvetch, a protracted complaint about working and growing older and injustice. Career issues and growing older still concern me, but the blog will no longer have a kvetch session spirit.

As we were exploring the subject of career change, working and midlife, my idealist temperament began to show itself . I am realigning the blog to point to personal “true north” while remaining  faithful to serving our mutual interests. Oh, no. It’s not going to turn into a gooey, bouncy “rah-rah” either…regardless of the pink strip in the new header. There are enough empty-headed “career advice” blogs floating around the internet.

As we grow and change internally, it naturally follows that the change will at some point show itself externally. This is the day the first leaves of the idea seed show themselves above the ground.

“Victoree’s Blog: No White Flag” is expanding to embrace not only the midlife job search, but the general subject of  personal and professional development in “the third age” of life. The point is to remain faithful to the Divine Mandate,  the personal “prime directive” which goes beyond the job search and career goals.

gypsy wagon

Immediately noticeable is a change in the subtitle, which is now,”Conquering in the third age”. I will continue to talk about working in this blog, but in the larger context of an entire lifetime. This opens up  space for dealing with all the seasons of a career. In fact, I am working on “The Work Of Winter”, a book about  managing the season of non-employment–winter.

So, the journey of the gypsy continues. On toward the rising sun we go!

Of Career Direction and Work History In The Resume

Do not call Fairfax County FD

As we press on to a discussion of the  “work history” section of the resume, I prevail on your mind to consider that there is what I would like to call an “inner resume” running below the paper resume.

My theory is that we carry our “inner resume”, the story we have built over time about working, inside us. Comments in its margins, our thoughts about each entry including its history, form a kind of continuity text. It is therefore important that the “inner resume” is totally reconciled with the paper resume because interviewers are keen to pick up on any dissonance between them. Doubt about integrity arises. That, I say, is why many articles advise seekers to over learn the content of the resume–especially if you had it written for you.

I do not know about you, but for me resumes were simple until I grew up. Things were straightforward until I  left formal schooling and began paddling about in the employment pool back in the 70′s.  I made many bad choices that made for a “checkered”, not-so-good employment history. Warn your children.

The headwaters of the writing stream that I am navigating like a champion today came ready to bubble up when I arrived on earth. That life making river; the oldest and strongest, rushed over the banks of my career history quite often to save my sanity. Thank heaven.

whither?

You see, I  had one main passion and did other things to support it, but from a corporate perspective, I seemed to wander aimlessly from job to job. My “employment history” section looked more like a patchwork quilt or a string of freshwater pearls. My resume challenge, I thought, was to make a not-so-good history look like it had always been a single, navigable stream  while keeping my real passion hidden.

The truth was that the signals I picked up from school and general society caused me to be ashamed of my talent/gift package and to want to be “like the high-powered corporate women” I saw put up as role models. They were “normal” and I was “abnormal”.

Just a few days ago, I celebrated my birthday– “old enough to know better”–half a century-plus. Having lived long enough and to have held several jobs I am free of head games and fairy tales about working.  I have made a custom resume for each of the stronger work history streams, dismissed the weak ones and only mention the odious ones in passing during an interview– if asked.

In Search of the Resume-saur: Objective

A nano-moment in time

“…on a resume done as an assignment for English class.”

We are continuing the discussion about resume building. Last week, we reviewed the “heading” of a resume containing the applicant’s legal name and usable contact information.

What follows below the contact information is disputed territory. In ages gone by (as late as 10 years ago) something usually called, “objective” lived here. It was a one-sentence blurb about the job seeker’s intentions that usually went something like this: “Seeking a position in the print media field where my natural talent for writing and English composition skill can be best applied.”…Oh, Margaret!

The only place I see this kind of thing is on a resume done as an assignment for English class. Somewhere out there in the universe must be teachers who have not written a resume in years, still using books dated before my father was born– sometime before WWI. My first resume, done around 1976, had a section like that.

Second Career

Welcome to the circus

Please, brothers and sisters: if you have any influence with a very young job seeker this summer, try to dissuade them from writing things like that on their resumes. Here it is: having an objective is not a bad thing in any sense–how else is a target determined in the job search?–but revealing that to a potential employer is an unspeakably brazen act. Guess what else? The potential employer does not give a black cat’s whisker about what the applicant’s star wish is. A potential employer wants to know what the applicant can do to further the goals of the company. This is a circus. What can you do to fulfill the employer’s star wish? Can you dance? Can you sing? Can you jump through hoops? I cannot tell you how long it took me to get this.

Yes! do have an objective. That objective has to be so clear it can be interpreted into a real job title that can be explained to a contact. By all means know what you want to do, where you want to do it and in what context, but keep that information in your marketing planning map until the appropriate time to talk about it.