The Ritual of The Interview:Before The Dance

Male peacock's mating display

In the last post, our discussion about interviewing parsed naturally into general segments  centered either around  “applicant states of being”, “gathered from the resume” or “don’t tell, don’t reveal”.  I have said in earlier posts that the job search is a game and games have rules. If the search is a game, the interview is its object and the best at the interview wins the game.  If the search for work is a hunt, the interview is its quarry and getting the job is the ultimate victory. The victorious hunter gets to “hang it on the wall”.

Everything a job seeker does points to the interview and once the interview is gained, another dynamic comes into play. This is the next phase. This is level two of the game. The quarry runs out into open field. In theory, interviews resemble theatrical auditions or panning for gold. The company is the panner and the applicant is the gold. The company is the art director and the applicant is the chorus girl. Applicants are the gold river and the company uses progressively finer sieves–many interviews– until the best two nuggets remain.

Again, for the applicant, the interview is the field for an intricate  mating dance ritual where several rival suitor-applicants vie with brilliant displays to attract the attention of the mate-company. The contender the company chooses becomes the new hire, the accepted  mate.

The ultimate object of the courtship is a marriage

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)

Do You Really Want To Know What My Real Weaknesses Are?

Nooooo!

In a word, no…

especially if the weakness is one that will  in any way negatively impact the company or the potential employee’s ability to do the job being interviewed for. Again, there are some things an applicant should never admit in an interview. Re-read that last sentence. I did not say, lie in an interview. I said, never present any weakness in an interview that will speak of the lack of an ability essential to performing the job. Why set up for failure? Interviewers ask applicants about their weaknesses to tease out several things, according to the headhunters and human capital experts I have met in my travels. When they ask this abominable question interviewers really want to know:

• Are you humble or do you take yourself more seriously than  you ought?
• How well do you understand yourself? Are you self-aware?
• Are you honest? Can you admit making mistakes and able to own up to it?
• Can you really do this job or is your resume a crock?
• Are your intentions honorable or is this just  a “one night stand’?

The next few posts will be a casual but serious discussion of the interview including dealing with the mystery of what to tell potential employers about things like Swiss cheese resumes, a stretch in the slammer, family care issues, and other “red flags” that give applicants and recruiters alike nightmares.

In one article I read entitled, “How To Answer the Question, What Is Your Greatest Weakness?”, featured below,I found one intriguing statement: “The questions you hear in an interview will reveal a lot about the mindset of the organization…”  It immediately sets up questions in my mind:

• Exactly what kind of weaknesses pose the biggest threat to that company?
• How is my kind of weakness going to bless or curse the company?
• Is there already a full complement of my kind of nut in the tree?
• is one of those nuts going to end up being my supervisor?

They hired my brother!

This suggests to me that if job seekers empower themselves they can take the body of questions corporations ask in interviews together and read them like tea leaves to find things out about the company what should be known before saying yes to a potentially toxic or abusive work relationship. 

• Candidate Tool Kit, Part 1: Interview Do’s and Don’ts (govigseniorcare.wordpress.com)
• Ten Things Not To Say During An Interview (therantingrecruiter.wordpress.com)
• Your Achilles’ Heel(s) (caitlindurkin.wordpress.com)
• What Questions Should I Be Ready to Answer at Just About Any Job Interview? [Ask Lifehacker] (lifehacker.com)
• 5 Things Not to Say in a Job Interview (money.usnews.com)
• Feb 16, 8:27pm “Good Interview, but unwanted job” (ilovemycrazyboss.wordpress.com)
• How to answer “What is your greatest weakness?” (patchspace.co.uk)
• 21 Things Hiring Managers Wish You Knew (sweetbriarcareerservices.wordpress.com)
• The Mystery Of The Interview (dougnewmanpro.wordpress.com)
• 15 Biggest Job Seeker Mistakes (frankcrumstaffing.wordpress.com)
• Interview Rules to Break (cmcacorner.com)
• Candidate Tool Kit, Part 1: Interview Do’s and Don’ts (govigseniorcare.wordpress.com)
• The Trick To Answering ‘Trick’ Interview Questions (personalbrandingblog.com)

The Third Page: References Will Be Provided

clear intentions?

In times gone by, “references to be provided upon request” squatted at the end of a resume like an ugly little troll. In even earlier days, the list of references was its last page. I still have a “third page”, but I never send it until it is needed. As we have mentioned before, unless the woo in a resume is very strong, a recruiter will not look past the fold. That means the list of references–page 3– will go unnoticed.

Recruiters and HR hardly spend 15 seconds eyeballing resumes these days–those resumes served up to them cherry picked from key word searches. A resume that is not properly SEO-ed (search engine optimized) with key words is invisible to the search engines. A resume that does not rise in the key word search will simply not be picked up.

If a search spits out 50 resumes that “make the cut” by key word, that number is shaken down through closer examination until 5 candidates’ resumes remain. This is the round where “packaging”–stand-out individuals and presentation really matters. Again, references do not enter into the discussion. Where does the “third page” enter, then?At the interviews. References and a few more rounds of interviews are  used to winnow the number to the final two.

Along with a lot of reading, job seekers attend a lot of seminars. As I listened to panel after panel of HR professionals and recruiters I came to this conclusion:

no ring; no thing.

I checked your references

I forget about showing references until I am sure the intentions are serious. The rejected need not waste resources of time and energy when there is no evidence of a serious woo to win. Unless I am just wild about a company the chase ends when I get the auto responder that says, “we will keep your resume on file for….” That is the signal to move on.

School Does Not Care What You Did Last Summer

Keep your resume focused

We have been talking about what to put into the “work history” section, or “relevant experience” part of the resume located just under the “summary”.

When I was seeking work as a teacher, a teacher substitute or an instructional aide, I made sure all my teaching experience and education was in the “related experience” section of my resume.

I can say with confidence that since a teaching contract is seasonal, many teachers  supplement their incomes when school is out of session. Some teachers do summer camp counseling or teach summer school. I built a “shadow career” in retailing to fill the economic void in my household budget created by unpaid winter break, spring break, summer break and between-contracts.

Seasonal sales associate jobs lasted 30-90 days and ran in same years as teaching appointments.  I handled that on my resume by putting them in a separate section titled, “other experience” located below my teaching experience. I never mentioned it in the main body of work experience because quite frankly, m’dear, school systems did not give a fig about what I did last summer–except if it had a direct relationship to teaching.

Guess what? Likewise, retail stores could give a broken crayon about what I did in the classroom. Whenever I applied for retail positions, I put my teaching experience in the “other experience” section. That neat little corner of my resume served to help the potential employer fill in the holes in my Swiss cheese resume.

Poof! You have a new career!

According to the current trends, a good resume is on average two pages long. It should be  so solidly packed with directly relevant experience that there is no room for anything else. I am now career shape-shifting back into my authentic form–a writer. When applying for writer/editor positions these days, like magic both teaching and retail sales appear only on job applications where appropriate and not on my resume or my Linked In profile at all.

Why? Because a resume, once again, is a marketing piece, not St. Patrick’s Confession.   Everything must support the brand image.

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.

Resume: An Invitation To The Ball

According to research, the most valuable real estate on a resume is “above the fold”. That term comes from the newspaper business. I was one of the last graduating classes of old-school trained journalists. In those days we all dreamed of landing jobs and retiring from newspapers the likes of  The Washington Post and The New York Times because we thought the “big papers” would live forever.

Righteous, full-sized newspapers, as opposed to “Tabloids” (we were taught to disdain), were presented for sale horizontally folded in half  on news stands. We were taught in Journalism school that  busy people read the headlines above that middle fold first, so the most serious news and most memorable pictures are always located there.

However, “above the fold” on a resume refers to the top part of a standard 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of letterhead business paper folded in half horizontally like an old-school newspaper. The last recruiter panel I attended pegged the average time a recruiter will look at a resume is 30 seconds. Imagine! 30 seconds to impress a potential employer with such stellar quality accomplishments that it will draw  an invitation to an in-person interview.  A resume, you see,  is a bid for an eyeball to eyeball meeting–the interview. The real purpose of a resume is to get that “invitation to the royal ball” the job seeker is looking for. This feat must be done through a 30-second read of the information on the top half of the page.