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• out-of date appearance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• Out of date resume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

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 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.

Marketing A Career: Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty!

There are two fairy tales that simply charmed me when I was a child. One was “Cinderella” and the other was “The Sleeping Beauty”. Today’s career marketing fairy tale takeoff is from The Sleeping Beauty”. To review the story…

nce upon a time there lived a childless royal couple who lost all hope of ever having a family when the queen discovered she was pregnant. Upon hearing the great news the entire kingdom went into baby-overdrive. The preparations for the new arrival were lavish and everything surrounding the pregnancy done with painstaking care.

Now, these were the days when belief in the fae was rife and fairy folk moved about between the human and the fairy realm unrestricted. The fairies were overjoyed about the new baby, so when the little princess arrived, three fairy godmothers attended her baptismal party.

Each one in turn went up to the crib and laid her gift on the child. The first fairy godmother gave the princess beauty; the second gave her love, but the third cursed her. “She will prick her finger on a spindle when she turns sixteen and die!”, the blackgaurd pronounced over the crib. Acting quickly, the second fairy godmother mollified the death sentence and turned it into “she will not die, but sleep for 100 years. Only a true prince will be able to awaken her”. After that, all spinning wheels were banished from use in that kingdom.

The years went by and the princess grew into a beautiful, kind and sweet young woman. The king and queen rested in the security that no harm would come to her since no spinning equipment was allowed within the borders of the kingdom. The princess was kept very close and had no knowledge of the weaver’s craft, so a crone who came into town with a loom on her cart aroused the princess’ curiosilty.

Apparently, the old woman had no knowledge that spinning was disallowed in that kingdom, so she set up the wheel in her cottage and began to make the raw materials of her product from wool she brought with her.

The princess was taken with the song of the spinning wheel and asked the old woman, “what are you doing?” “Spinning, my dear”, the weaver woman answered. “Would you show me how you do that?”, asked the prinecess. “Of course, little one. Come here and hold the spindle”. The weaver handed the princess the spindle so she could spin the thread as it came off the wheel, but the inexperienced girl took hold of the instrument the wrong way and cut herself.

Suddenly, the old woman changed into a dark fairy–the same one who had cursed her at her birth. As the princess fell to the floor the fairy-woman shrieked with anger when she found out that her curse did not kill as expected but only produced a deep sleep. The king, the queen and everyone in the village around the castle fell asleep as did their princess who could only be awakened with a kiss of pure love from the lips of a true prince…

…And that’s the way I conducted my career in the early days. As did many young women, I thought all I had to do was be a “good girl” and wait to be ”discovered”. The university is very good at what it is built to do, but beneath it all, the attitude seems to be that any smart student will “find her way” into a good job somehow. Yes, there are entire departments dedicated to helping students find their way in the world after college. The better ones pull in the odd group of company recruiters on occasion, but none of all that expensive education includes a single “best practices techniques to finding employment” or even a “life/career management/” course.

It is embarrassing to tell you how long I held on to that fairy tale. Hidden in the bowels of the companies that temporary agencies farmed me out to, I quietly buried myself in my work having confidence that someone would notice. I thought that some day, some executive with a pure heart would see me, become my mentor, and give me the “kiss” of a successful career. I would be “discovered” just like in the stories about famous screen ingénues (some of those “discovery” tales are manufactured, you know).

My first job hunt after leaving college was simply a shotgun resume send (pure numbers game) of 100 resumes. It produced several responses, two in-person interviews, and one job offer, which was withdrawn the very next week.

Waiting to be “discovered”? Waiting around for a magnanimous executive, a prince, to notice a quiet, “good girl”? There is an interesting article from  Careerealism about managing a career by playing the Sleeping Beauty role and how to snap out of it.

Wake up, Sleeping Beauty!

The one, most important lesson I ever learned in the business world is that Sleeping Beauties are left behind asleep. That is where having an effective career marketing plan comes in. As threatening, vulgar  and unromantic as it may sound it takes an effective marketing plan– well planned with plotted action steps and logistics to get Beauty before the eyes of her target audience–fashion editors of Vogue magazine or before the eyes of a future king.

The Ugly Duckling Days Of Change

The Ugly Duckling

Change. Everybody talks a good game about change. Chrysalises of hopeful futures hang on every Christmas tree. They partly open in gyms and in clinics and in journals. Then about March, they fall slain by the struggle like early buds that freeze in an untimely spring snow. The “failures at change” have a pint of ice cream to console themselves and return to “what was” having given up becoming the butterfly.

Why don’t more people succeed at elemental change?  The truth is that change is not easy. Change is difficult. I believe it is the “ugly duckling effect” that many find so challenging.

Say, what? The “ugly duckling effect”?

Are you familiar with the tale of the ugly duckling? Allow me to revisit that story with you. I am telling my version of the tale I learned from Hans Christian Anderson.

A duck was going about her duty one season setting on eggs. She did what ducks do; what she had always done with all the clutches of eggs she laid season after season. However, this brood she was setting was unusual because one of the eggs seemed to be a little different. The mother duck ignored that difference and kept setting; kept going about her duty.

 

Right on time, as they did every season, the eggs hatched. One by one the little wet heads poked through their shells and in minutes they were all blow-dried in the spring air into bolls of yellow fluff with yellow beaks and feet–except for one–a boll of grey fluff with  a skinny black beak and wide, black feet. The mother duck was puzzled. She dismissed the “different” duckling as just a freak of nature and led them all down to the water for their first swim. They all swam beautifully, though she wondered why the little grey duckling dipped her head into the water so long. And her voice! She did not give a melodic “quack” like her brothers and sisters. It was more like a “honk” with a little broken squeak on the end. Ugly voice.

 

As time went by, this “different” duckling grew taller than her nest mates; even her walk was different: more upright off the grass. Such big feet she had. One day, her nest mates’ yellow fluff began to fall off their bodies and juvenile feathers appeared, showing the mark of their species.  Their sister did not have that distinctive stout neck and low, compact form. She was grey and gangly with a long neck, longer wings and a black mask across her face. “If you aren’t the ugliest thing we have ever seen!”, they hissed at her. “You’re hideous!.” Then they poked her; bit her and drove her out of the ducks’ area. The gangly, grey duck shuffled away to the next pond alone.

 

As the ugly duckling paddled silently across the water, she was startled by a family of neighbor birds. She hid in the reeds and watched them parade by. Behind some of the magnificent, white feathered adults were the fledging teens, preening themselves of their grey feathers. Behind some of the adults were small, fluffy grey hatchlings. “Ducklings?”, the ugly ducking thought. She looked at her reflection in the pond and saw that she looked like them. Immediately she swam up to the  ones who seemed to be her own age and hailed them. They drifted around her and giggled in their harsh voices, “You’re not a duck! You’re one of us–a swan. You must be our lost sister”.

 

They invited her to float down the stream with them. Eventually, she met her original nesting pair who were thrilled to see the daughter they thought was lost a season ago.

Trumpeter Swan-charleyharperprints.com

When fall came, the ugly duckling’s juvenile feathers were all shed and in their place were the feathers of an adult swan. She was all white except for a slender, black beak and a black band across her face, the mark of her family.

 

I told this tale to say this: sometimes job seekers change something about themselves to “repackage” or “reimage” themselves. It is part of a “reinvention” movement to craft a  younger, stronger, more active, smarter, more up-to-date image. People who are not in a job search mode tend to laugh behind their hands and roll their eyes heavenward at all this metamorphosis, I have read. No tea and sympathy from folk who think about the unemployed once per week–when the “unemployment figures” come out in the news media.

We job seekers change hairstyles and glasses. We color our hair. We buy new clothes (an inside change has really happened when we start to revamp our wardrobe). We “get work done”. Many of the changes have stages. This takes time.

We head straight into change. We begin to “shape shift”. The stadium of friends and family seems to be smiling and cheering for change in the beginning. It feels powerful when we first trot out our dreams and intentions, but that first rush of success does not last. Actually going through the process of change is a long, lonely stretch of road. Change is not a sprint, but a marathon we find out. Change exacts its fees in patience and pain. These are the “ugly ducking” days.

 

 The hard work of change is largely solitary and unrewarded. The unprepared become discouraged and fall away in the early stages. They who persist longer become tempted to relax the standards when the change regimen begins to actually challenge established patterns and habits. Believe me. I know  whereof I speak having made many, many attempts to loose ”baby weight” since 1985. The “baby” is married now, but the weight is still there and has gained company.

 

The real work of change is a period of discomfort in increasing intensity. There is so much pull to fall back into the older, more familiar and comfortable. This is why “change” is so popular initially, but so hard to really get done. This is why people tend to put off necessary change until forced to by outside events. At that point change mounts a coup and snatches the command position instead of being managed and controlled with dispassion, strength and mindfulness.

The “Wrecking Ball” Card: 5 Career Deal Breakers

The "Wrecking Ball" Card

This is the fourth and final card in the spread, the “wrecking ball” card. On this card are five things that will make working at any specific place like living in Hell. Above, I am showing you my own completed card. To get a sense of what should be on yours, Look at your other cards.  Look at your temperament and your strengths.  Look at your gifts and your Holland Code.  Look at your value system. Take all that in consideration and  think deeply about what kind of work environment you simply could not tolerate.  For the “glass half full” crowd: think deeply about and envision the kind of work environment that would bring out the best in you.  You actually could write your card from either angle. You choose. As an aside, “glass half empty” people are not evil. Just different.

Think about it like this: would you marry someone you did not know well? After all, a huge investment of life-time will be spent preparing for, commuting back and forth from, and living at a place of employment for at least two or three years.  Interviewing is much like the courtship period of a relationship–the time you find out that the face she presents comes out of a bottle and that he hates to go anywhere that does not have a TV in it.

With both dating and working it is much better to find out as much as possible on the front end. It pays to be able to make an educated decision about how your most precious commodity, your time, will be spent. This set of five intolerable conditions would be your “career deal breakers”; things you would say, “no thanks” to an employer about in the interview. Though you may think you are desperate enough to “take anything”, that is not quite the truth nor would it be wise. And another thing: you cannot do anything you want to do actually. You came to the earth with an assignment; a “Divine Mandate”. You came equipped to do your job on earth, not every job.

For example: I will always be better with words than numbers. I admire people who can reason in numbers. They’re cool. However, I know myself so well that I am quite comfy being an expert in  language and not worried about my dearest friend, the engineer, who is an expert in her field.

Unfortunately, education is not into strengths development. School has led us into this myth of “you can do everything well”; that “deficiency teaching–bettering your weaknesses” at the expense of building natural strengths is a good thing. Let me tell you this: You can teach a fish to climb all you want. A squirrel will always be better at it. You can reward a tortoise all you want. The hare will always be the faster runner.

Spun out all the way to the end, some form of the “wrecking ball conditions”  may be at the heart of the issues you could be fired for three to six months down the road.

As said earlier, there are things you would rather know on the front end about an employer. The interview is the appropriate time to find out what you might not be able to discern from other research. In the interview, rephrase the statements on your card into positively posed questions to the potential employer. The answers will tip you off to a company’s culture and clue you in about whether or not you might fit.

Many people think they do not have choices in this job search game. The fact is you do. It pays in the long run to make the best decisions possible by researching, asking, talking, networking, listening to employees (past and present), and “reading between the lines”–reading the cards.

Victoree’s Shape-shifting Job Gypsy Game

Art Deco Frame found in Dover Publications

Last week, we began a discussion about finding “the divine mandate” or one’s “life passion”. As I told you, I had difficulty confidently answering the question, “what do you really want to do?” and “what is your passion?” I became whatever was needed where needed. While making a living as a “temp”; a “job gypsy”, I habitually ignored my own innate passion. Being able to actually connect with work and actually enjoy what I did to make money seemed to be a fairy tale to me. Being able to make meaning at work? Ludicrous! My sense of direction, my inner compass became confused.

Let’s invent a game.

I’m going to give it a working name. I’ll  name it after me, “Victoree’s  Shape Shifting Job Gypsy Card Game”. I sourced the art deco cards from the free Dover art collection you can get every week here: http://www.doverpublications.com/sampler It’s a favorite frame I originally used for my personal scrap booking project about the election of 2008. I’ll share it with you one day only if enough readers ask.  You can  find the Dover Art series of  clip art books at any Borders Book Store in the art and design section.

The object of this game is to come closer to finding out your “true work”.  Any number can play. Caveat: This game is meant for entertainment only and is not in any way meant to substitute for professional career counseling. Yes, I know your career is nothing to play with, but, I have found out in my short lifetime that games can teach.   (look me up on Linked In. I do hold the M. Ed. in elementary education. Theory is from Piaget.) Approaching new things through play is a time and teacher honored way to deal with a scary subject. Mr. Rogers said, “You can play about it”.

This game is the result of my months of reading career search books and taking various self-administered tests. The object of all this research  is to  gather together as much intelligence about  the self as possible to  determine a career direction more accurately.  The research will be then used to fill out the face of the cards. When we finish making the cards, we will begin the real play.

The game approaches self-knowledge from multiple “ways of seeing”  and is most valuable as a sort of “compass”. This is my theory: looking at yourself from as many angles as possible helps build a truer picture. It helps jump over the fences of how we have been conditioned to think about ourselves. Remember my comments about a six-year-old running an adult life a few weeks ago in, “Sit down and shut up little girl“? That’s what I mean by conditioned thinking about the self.  I have found a binder and a highlighter useful while doing the research.

First, let’s do your colors and  decide whether you’re an “out-ie” or an “in-ie” (extroverted or introverted).  I’m inventing and playing concurrently with you. If you come up with suggestions to tweak it,  comment about it. I hope you’ll gain knowledge and have fun.

So, are you introverted or extroverted? Blue, red, green or gold? Find out at: http://www.truecolorscareer.com

…And They Don’t Like “Virgins” Either

Queen Victoria, the bride

I mentioned in an earlier discussion that prospective employers do not like job hoppers. Well, let me tell you something else: they don’t like virgins either.   You see, brothers and sisters, these are the rules of engagement of the job hunting game–and it is a game:

1. Present a “winner” career history
2. Be able to prove you can do the job by having done it before
3. Act like you’re not unemployed

I know the last one is wild, but it is true. Career counselors know this. Being a veteran job hunter (the essence of working actors’ and freelancers’ lives–looking for work), I have always known about this. However, in my travels, no potential employer I interviewed with had guts enough to actually speak “the rule that cannot be named”, out loud. Go to Career Diva and read about one employer in Florida who did.  This is causing a firestorm of comments in my alumni Linked In group. Companies are being outed about the secret of rule two.

If you have read enough research and listened to enough advice (because you, like I, have been unattached a LONG time) you also know that being young, tall, slim, good-looking and extroverted gives you power balls.  They who do not have the power balls had better know incantations and get magic weapons. I’m a sorceress. What about you?

Now, rule number two is the reason anybody who is just recently entering the workforce or is changing career fields (jumpers!) will have such a hard time making a convincing case in an interview. The reasons are the same as they were for the breakup with my first boyfriend in college.  Neither potential employers nor recruiters like to know their company is ”your first”.

Rule number two is why Distributive Education exists. Rule number two is why internships exist. Rule number two is why working summer jobs is so important. Potential employers like to bet with the house. They are skittish about taking a chance on a new, untried worker who may not fit or grow properly on the job. Replacing  and training people is an expensive venture.

I feel the moral of this cautionary tales is stated best in one of my favorite blogs, “Career Advice” written by Marc Cenedella.   His column can be found at “The Ladders” website. In a post called, “How Your Resume Can Tell Your Story”, one of his guests, Erica Moore-Burton, gives the essence of rule two when she told him,  “A prospective employer has to know that they are not dealing with someone from scratch and there is either a base knowledge or some relevant experience that is going to benefit them…Remember W.I.F.T. … what’s in it for them!”

…And there we have it! In the job market, it is no credit to have a history that looks like Queen Victoria’s wedding dress. Though they would rather not see a worker with a “scarlet woman” history trekking through the door, one with the right shade of pink for the season is always in fashion.