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• out-of date appearance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• Out of date resume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)

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.

My Wonderful Life Between Jobs: How To Keep Going

I am the queen.

Of course one day the crashing reality must be faced. One must give a straight answer to the question: what have you been doing for two years since you last drew a paycheck? At first that intrusive, incredibly boorish question used to throw me down. That question is so lacking in class.  I remember when I first heard it I used to lie there and let the anger-embarrassment-sorrow pound me into the dirt and hope the whole experience would just be over quick. After that I could hobble away; pretend it was a dream until the next time. This was my life until something remarkable happened in my thinking. Something happened in my soul that changed me forever.What was I doing between jobs? I was living, of course. I was being me. What I do does not define me (see our talk last week. Scroll one posting back). With or without employment I am still me and that is important because I am an incredibly talented, worthwhile human being. Our humanity determines that  we all have intrinsic worth.

A person’s real worth is not her net worth whether she is a queen or a courtesan. It was only when I came to believe this  that I began to see myself as also a worthy employee or, why not, a worthy entrepreneur. This is the mindset that has to be in place within a job seeker before she can conduct an authentic search for work:whether I am employed or not I am a worthwhile person. I don’t even have bus fare right now, but I am still someone who is valuable and highly valued.This has to exude from within. Not a puff of light powder fresh from a motivational seminar, this is what will keep the job seeker continuing to be on top of the earth when all indicators point only to the futility, the uselessness and to the conclusion that a better position is to be among the dead.

I am the courtesan

Some call this the brave heart. Some call this  the lioness’ heart. Whatever anyone names it, this is the survivor’s heart.

Related articles

• The Day That “What You Do” Is Just That (victoree.wordpress.com)
• Zen, Human Action and Universal Harmony (libertarianway.me)

SHAPE-SHIFTING: A JOB SEEKER BECOMES–HOW THE PROCESS HAPPENS

http://depression.wikia.com/wiki/Clinical_depression

Last time I told a little tale about “disassociation”, my view of what begins to happen as a former employee has less and less contact with the former job over time. I said that ex-employees slowly begin to think of themselves in terms other than associated with the company. The morph begins here. Some people, extroverts especially, begin to show withdrawal symptoms from mild to severe from the instant social network that the old job used to provide so finding a new job might in reality be an attempt to quickly end the uncomfortable position of not having a social “nest” to be in. The introvert may show withdrawal brought on by the absence of a “place to go every day”;  the background noise of the old job in another way. However, since the greatest problem for an introvert might be “invisibility” on the job (what do you DO here anyway?), the task of finding a new place with the right background noise is agonizing and tiring because of suddenly having to talk  so much to so many new people. Please put an end to this agony quick once again.

Six months later, however, in some job seekers‘ heads  attention and interest begins to wane. It may take more effort to keep focused on the passion As the “old work identity” begins to dissolve like an Alka Seltzer tablet. The dispossessed, disincorporated former employee begins the real search for a new home; a new body,  I would say. This is stage two of the shape shift; a place where the seeker is not what she was nor what she will be.

As I remember, this was the place in the process where my self-image imploded. I tried on jobs and titles one after another and became increasingly frustrated because none of them felt “right”. Questions about where exactly I fit in society got me out of bed at 3:00a.m. for weeks. Nothing is more stressful than to have to put some title, any title on a resume. Nothing is more mortifying than stumbling through a makeshift answer to “what do you bring to the table?”, another form of , “tell us about yourself”. What belongs in that blank space? Nobody I knew had any answers. I was expected to figure it out on my own as most good career counselors usually recommend. What do you really want to do? What is your real basic passion?

But, “figuring it out on my own” takes time. So much time without a landing target frustrates networking partners because to them it  looks like a lack of focus or seriousness.  It seems so much easier to just stumble into yet another short-term “throw away” job. End the pain fast. Never face the real question. Hide from the real answer. The next step is life or death: stay a formless blob or snatch up the courage to participate in creating the new reality; making the new body.

That is the place where I ran out of tears. I decided to become myself.

Related articles

• The Day That “What You Do” Is Just That (victoree.wordpress.com)
• Four Meaningful Ways We Can Help Job Seekers (integratedcatholiclife.org)

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.

Resume Poision: This Stuff Could Kill Your Career

Dead application guaranteed

Allow me to pause here for the warnings…In the collected wisdom of contemporary resume writing professionals, there are certain things that should not be found on a resume at the peril of having it immediately sent to resume third circle. In the literature review of the subject, certain things  popped up with Swiss watch regularity:

Misspelled words

Bad resumes: circle 3

There is still no machine that can best a good human editor (I am assured to always be needed!). As good as they are, spell checkers in word processing programs are not yet capable of determining the appropriate spellings in all cases. Plus, the sentence fragment style of resume writing drives computer grammar programs to drink. Beware.

T.M.I (Too Much personal Information)
My beloved of 28 years is a pre-boomer naturalized American. Adjustments had to be made to Americanize his old-fashioned, European-style resume that included age, date of birth, height, weight, health condition, marital status and people group (that’s race in the USA). Additionally, he was required to submit a passport sized black and white full face photo.

Including any of these things is resume poison in the United States in 2011. In passing, there is a move in Europe to standardize and modernize the resume. Take a look at a conversation going on in Linked In now comparing the European resume and the American resume should there be readers toying with the idea of working in the UK.

A bit of history: In the pre-Civil Rights Movement era, submitting a photo with the application was common practice. In those times blacks were forbidden to hold certain kinds of jobs and employers would simply choose not to pull a “colored-looking” face from the app stack to interview when they pleased.  Pictures submitted with apps was banned, but other methods of excluding people cropped up to take its place. It is like slicing off one of Hydra’s heads to only have it replaced by two more.Now, sneaky potential employers analyze given names and check the locations associated with certain addresses. For that and security reasons, some applicants now leave off  specific street number addresses in favor noting the state and city  of residence only. No pictures on resumes, brothers and sisters–especially not the sexy glam or vacation snaps.

More “arsenic articles” – Foggy, self-serving  objective

Foggy objectives scream, “I want to keep my options open”. In other words, “I don’t really know what I want” to potential employers. Put a job title on the line where the objective used to live followed by a two sentence flash (think, elevator pitch) about the benefits a company can expect by hiring you. A headline stating the job title sought leaves no room for doubt about exactly what job an applicant is seeking and sends a clear message to networking partners walking your resume in, applicant parsing software, HR people (some of them may be gnomes and imps) and recruiters. Since it is now possible to tailor headlines to match the job applied for, using that power is not a transgression. No smear on integrity.

It is better to have two focused resumes than one foggy one. This is true especially for job gypsies (like yours truly) and renaissance people. Believe me, if Leonardo Divinci, the “father of the resume”, had to write one today, he would not have just one.

home-made cough elixir

100% Pure “Functional” Resume Recruiters hate this one with a passion. Functional resumes leave a bad taste in their mouths because they want to know in no uncertain terms “what you did and when you did it and for how long“. Once again, job gypsies and renaissance people would be better off using a carefully crafted “blended” or “hybrid” resume instead. Recruiters are suspicious of this one too, but are slowly getting used to this flavor.

Other Poisonous Substances in Resumes

"Beware the poisionous resume"!

• Leaving Off  Dates
• Resume too long
• Funky and/or Old Fashioned fonts
• No accomplishments; plenty of duties
• Unprofessional email address

More Resume Top No No’s  Lists On The Web (and some comedic relief)

Career Builder’s Top Ten Resume Killers

HR Confidential’s Top Five Resume Killers

Sooper Articles’ Top Ten Resume Killers

Job Mob’s Funniest Resume Mistakes

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.

A Home-made Resume

produce of resume writing

Some of us must write our own resumes and that is no sin. Some of us are under severe financial duress in the search for new employment. There simply is no room in a poverty-level budget for a $100.00 plus professionally written resume. Food and shelter are more important right now. The best bet may be to locate a professional who will agree to do pro-bono work. Others of us are control freaks. Having decent writing ability and a bit of an eye for design, we prefer to meet the challenge of resume writing ourselves, but there are roadblocks along the way and a little help is appreciated.

Personally, I love telling stories but I hate writing about myself. Resumes, bios,

Resume! OH NOOOOOO!

and Linked In profiles get “kinda funky” and I tend to procrastinate on doing these tasks because of left-over self-esteem issues. The last time I had my freshly done resume critiqued by a certain job board (which shall remain nameless to allow grace to the guilty) the agency told me in the comments that “if you were sushi, your resume presents you as “cold dead fish”.  The sting in the tail of professional resume writers I see advertising on line seems to be provoking anxiety by using a foreboding  undertone:   “don’t get caught presenting a ‘homemade’ resume’. This is not a job for amateurs.”

I put off doing it again.

Contact Information

There are a few items immediately below the owner’s name on that document that should be there no matter who does it: contact information. Many resumes hop, step and jump to the waste bin because of the lack of contact information. The ticket to the ball will never get to a person who does not say where the ticket should be delivered. Of course, there are folk on the pro-address side and the con-address side.

Many people, for various reasons including security concerns, residence in a place of incarceration, being in the process of relocation or fear an employer practices a 21st century form of “redlining” may be reluctant to declare an address. Nevertheless, there should be a way to get in touch. Special circumstances can be explained later.  Click on an interesting article below about email addresses from Brazen Careerist, a favorite blog of mine. Even if an applicant’s real present address is “in an old oak tree in the Hundred-Acre Woods”, in a spare bedroom at a friend’s home or in a local emergency shelter, real addresses,  real phone numbers and a businesslike email address are necessary.