Dress for Success

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. That is certainly true in a job interview. You can find dozens of books on the subject of dressing for corporate success. But we live in a very "casual" age, so it is not surprising that so many HR people have shared with me that too many job seekers today just don't "get it" when it comes to looking hireable.

I recently read an article by Brian Maynor (http://www.brianmaynor.com). Brian is a style coach and I want to share a few of his ideas for being properly clothed when you go on a job interview. I cover many of these and other in my book, Hired!, but Brian's suggestions are all spot-on. After all, this is his day job!

• Keep your main colors neutral and understated. Navy blue and middle-hue blues look good on most people. Be wary of distracting patterns and textures.
• Use contrasting colors sparingly. A vivid scarf or tie can bring your neutral colors to life. But don't be so aggressive with one, or multiple, "pop" colors that three weeks later the interviewer is talking about your color wheel and cannot remember your name or face.
• Be neat. Whatever you wear must be clean, pressed, properly fitting, and well-coordinated. Make sure your hair is clean, properly cut, and well-groomed. Shoes must be polished! Scuffed or worn shoes have power to totally downgrade your entire look.
• Jewelry should not shout! Smaller is better. Pendant earrings are not a good idea for either women or men. One ring on each hand is quite enough. Look at yourself as a stranger would see you. Check your hands, wrists, neck, ears, ankles, and toes for any jewelry that will be distracting or controversial. When you find a guilty culprit: leave it at home!

I will add to Brian's list a few of the clothing suggestions I have in Hired! :

• Do not wear cologne or perfume. Nada. Not even a smidgen. Many people have allergies to scents. What you think smells great might make your interviewer nauseous. Not a good scenario.
• Cover up or use makeup to conceal your tattoos (unless you are applying for a job in a bar). Remove all visible piercing jewelry. The interviewer is really not interested in your epidermal artwork.
• If you don't have an eye for color or style, ask a knowledgeable friend or family member to help. Let them review what is in your closet. If they can't find elements that work together, ask if they will go to the store and help you pick out the piece that will tie the others together. Be prepared to spend some money to assemble a professional look. It's an investment in your future.
• Ladies, the quickest path to not even finishing the interview, much less getting a job offer, is to wear clothing that is too tight, too short, too revealing, or just too provocative. In other words, "too anything." If you have any question about whether an item is "too anything," then it probably is.
• Being dressed "appropriately" is easy to grasp if you think of it this way: if you dress for your interview in the clothing you will wear on the job, then you are under-dressed for the interview. If you dress one level up from what you would wear if you work for them, you are dressed appropriately. For example, for a man, if the normal workday clothing is jeans and work boots (as in construction or trades), or just casual clothing (as in a shopping mall retail store) then one level up is a dress shirt and complementary tie, and chinos or Dockers slacks. If the workday rule is business casual (as in most office work) then one level up is a suit.

In summary, don't make your clothing the focus of your interview. Dress so the people you talk with are not distracted by what you are wearing. You are the one looking for a job, not your attire. The best choices are the ones that help people remember you, not what you wore.

It's About Them, Not You

I recently met a young man who had gone to the same school as my children. I learned he has been interviewing for a new job. He has gone to interviews with three companies but nothing seems to be happening. I asked about his approach. He said everything has been great in getting the interviews. They seem to go well, but then he gets the "We're just not sure there is a match reply.

I asked about what the interview discussions covered and a pattern immediately surfaced. When each interviewer asked him if he had any questions about the position he was applying for, this young man asked about benefits, vacation, profit sharing, 401k, and so forth. His fatal mistake was asking what the company can do to meet his self-interest.

But the company wants to know what HE can do for THEIR bottom line. Period.

Make yourself stand out in an interview by asking your interviewer questions like these: ask informed questions about the company, ask about what they value in their employees, and ask what you can do to help the company become more profitable.

Ask About the Company

Learn everything you can about the company: their services, their products, their market visibility, and their clients. Visit their website and read the pages other than the "Careers" page. Learn who runs the company, the company officers if they are a large corporation, and their company locations. Understand exactly what products and services are provided by the location where you are interviewing. When you show you are willing to do preparation like this, they will see you are willing to be thorough and informed, and that you are actually interested in them.

Ask About What They Value in Employees
You will always get some boilerplate answers: honesty, integrity, creativity and so forth. But you might get some other useful information as well: willingness to work long hours and weekends, willingness to travel 50% of the time, and so forth. This will tell you a lot about the management and company culture. When they state an attribute that aligns with your personality or skills, you can reply with a statement such as "I am glad to hear that. One of the areas I have focused on in all of my work is being sure I am always working on what will give the company the highest value." Reinforce what you can do to meet THEIR values.

Ask What You Can Do to Make Them More Profitable

You might have specific, valuable skills such as project management. But don't start by telling them what a good project manager you are. Ask them where the company needs additional or improved capabilities beyond what they have now. What are the company's plans to improve their bottom line over the next year? When you hear what THEIR plans are, you can then describe what you can to do help them achieve THEIR goals.

It's really simple, but too many job seekers fail to look at the job process from the company's perspective. And this is the only perspective that matters if a job offer is desired. The young man above fell into the trap of thinking his job search was first about him and his goals. These are important, of course, but getting to the offer requires convincing the company that you are the one who will help them meet THEIR goals. After we talked a bit he started to realize that his next task was to see job search from the other side.

Dinosaurs Don't Buy iPads

A bright note in May's jobs reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is that one sector of our economy is growing: construction. This is a big turnaround, driven by low mortgage interest rates and pent-up demand. But in January 2007 this sector tanked and pink slips were hemorraging throughout the U.S.

Which brings me to the issue of: what if your sector is dying, or hanging on only with life support? What do you do if "your job" is just not viable anymore? A prudent person recognizes that a dead-end is...a dead-end. So the prudent person changes direction, changes his or her thinking, changes his or her goal. In other words, a prudent person adapts.

Dinosaurs don't adapt. They didn't adapt...that's why they are called dinosaurs.

I write about this a lot in my book, Hired!. Let me explore the plight of the construction worker after 2007. Up until that date residential and commercial building was exploding in the U.S. housing bubble. Then the bottom dropped out of the U.S. and other national economies. Millions of U.S. construction workers were laid off. Some chose, or fell into, a period of living off government unemployment benefits. Some found sporadic construction work. Others found entirely new areas of work.

It is this latter group who will be the survivors in the coming years. Because they adapted. They did not limit themselves to thinking only "I do concrete" or "I do drywall." They were willing to accept that while their last job in construction required specific skills needed in the construction industry, they were not limited to that. Survivors see themselves as possessors of skills that can be applied in many, many areas, and do not limit themselves to thinking "I do this and only this."

But what of the others? What of the construction workers who did not find other positions, or fell into government welfare?

Perhaps no jobs were available. In some rural areas this is a real possibility. Or, perhaps jobs were available but they paid less than what the previous job paid. This is very probable. The dark underbelly of our pathetically slow, anemic jobs recovery is that the new jobs are primarily in service industries (a fancy way of saying "low-paying, fast-food and retail jobs"). Or, perhaps the worker discovered that government unemployment benefits pay even more than working. This has been a rational economic decision for many people. Everyone will choose the biggest income option of those available. But, there is a dark side to the upside of unemployment welfare: the longer you are out of work, the more difficult it will be to find a new job. It is a depressing dilemma.

After a prolonged period of unemployment one does become a dinosaur. The stigma, the loss of existing skills, the inability to obtain new skills eventually can be fatal as one fails to adapt, and merely adopts a passive posture. Dinosaurs don't buy iPads. They don't change. They don't learn. They don't adapt to new realities. That is why they are not here today.

A new reality in the construction industry is that it is opening a whole set of employment opportunities that have not been around for five years. Perhaps this is a time you can return to this industry. Perhaps you have never worked in construction, but it could be a worthy area to explore. You don't have to know how to frame a roof. Construction companies needs administrative office help, inventory, procurement, accounting and contract sourcing help.

Adapt. It's all about whether you are willing to think outside your old title or job name, and adapt.

Resumé Remedies

Let's assume you have read my book, Hired!, and you have followed the Four-Step process I describe there. That means

1. You have identified the skills or knowledge you have to offer a potential employer
2. You have identified the companies you want to contact, who will benefit from hiring you
3. You have made a first contact with one or more of these candidate companies

And now it is time to move to Step Four: Get to Know Each Other.

Getting to know each other means having a meaningful, planned interaction with a view of a possible job relationship. This interaction is normally a formal interview, but the interview is usually preceded by a presentation of your job qualifications in a written resumé. And the resumé is one of the major tollgates that can scuttle your job search in a digital heartbeat.  Here are some of the resumé factors I discuss in Hired! about making your resumé presentable and readable.

Fonts

One font is sufficient, and don't use more than two fonts in your resumé. Make sure these fonts are complementary. Serif fonts like Georgia or Palatino Linotype are easier to read and look better on a computer screen than a non-serif font like Arial or Verdana. I admonish you not to use Times New Roman. It may be the default font in Microsoft Word, but Times New Roman is not the best font for on-screen display. Keep your font size at 10 or 12 point. You may have great eyesight, but going smaller than 10 point will make your printed resumé difficult to read for a visually challenged reader. Going larger than 12 point will simply convey the impression that you are trying to be cute or fill empty space.

File Format

You may use Microsoft Word, but not everyone does. If you submit a resumé via an e-mail attachment the safest format is one that is available on all the major computer operating environments of Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. The best cross-platform file format is Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format). You can buy a program to convert your resumé to PDF format. Your computer or word processor may already provide a way to output the PDF format. If not, you can search the Internet for free conversion programs compatible with your operating environment.

Plain Text Version

You may need to submit your resumé directly in an email rather than in an attached PDF file. Or you may need to paste your resumé into an input field on a company's Careers web page. The latter situation will probably strip out all your resumé formatting, and the former scenario may result in a plain-text delivery to the recipient e-mail address which also means your formatting will be removed. So, to assure that your resumé layout still looks good, prepare a plain-text version of your resumé. On Windows you can start by pasting your resumé into Notepad! You will lose bold text, and all words will be in the same font. Insert blank lines to offset headings, change the width of your Notepad window and make sure the word-wrap does not result in distortions of the layout. When you get it the way you want it, Save it so you will have it ready when needed.

Naming Your Resumé

HR people have told me that a common resumé submittal mistake is that the candidate submits a file titled "Resume.docx." How is an HR person, or a hiring manager, going to find your resume with a generic name like that?  Put your full name in the name of your resumé file: "Resume of Gary K. Evans.docx."

Your E-mail Address

The last major mistake people make is to submit their resumé by e-mail from a totally non-professional address. Get an innocuous e-mail address from which you will send your electronic resumés. An address of "tootiredtopayattention@hotmail.com" will be an instant turn-off, as will "UFGatorman@yahoo.com." Use an e-mail address with your real name, and don't make it cute. You are looking for a professional position, not rushing a fraternity or sorority.

Defeating Discouragement

I have been inactive for a few weeks. Four weeks ago I broke 4 bones in my face playing soccer (but the striker did not score!). During my recovery I admit I have had some moments of discouragement. I am not healing as quickly as I wish. I am totally inactive and feel like a slug. I know I will be back on the field eventually, but as I reflected on my own discouragement I thought of how many job seekers are now discouraged to the point of just giving up.

Last Friday the March 2013 U.S. employment figures were released and they are dismal. What struck me profoundly in these statistics is the number of people who have just stopped looking for a job. And, in case you are not aware, if you are not looking you are not counted as unemployed. Think of that: if all 23 million unemployed and underemployed just stopped looking the unemployment rate would fall to zero! And the government would claim total vindication of its policies. Well, as it has been said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Discouragement is erosive. It feeds upon itself. It becomes the focus of your mind...until you decide to focus on the POSSIBLE.

Is it possible that your difficulty stems from looking in the same, wrong place over and over? Is it possible that you are appealing to the wrong gate-keeper?

What I am referring to is Human Resources (HR). One of the main themes in my book, Hired!, is how and why to avoid HR at all costs. Let me explain why.

First, the role of HR is not to find a job for you. The central function of HR is to assure corporate alignment and compliance with Federal, State and other regulatory requirements regarding their current employees.

Second, the other role of HR is to eliminate you as a job applicant. When I was a hiring manager my own experience with corporate HR was occassionally adversarial, and too often confrontational. They would not bring me candidates with the skills I needed, and sometimes fought me tooth-and-nail when I wanted an offer made to a candidate.

Third, when you follow the conventional approach of filling out a web application form or paper form, that application is fielded first by HR. In the case of web applications there is now usually a digital tool that scans your application for keywords, and HR people have fallen into looking just for keyword matches rather than actually reading your application, which takes too much time for them to do. And, when you consider that in today's job market a company may receive fifty to a hundred applications or resumes in a single day, you can appreciate why they would cut every corner they can.

Last, when you follow the conventional approach you are joining dozens or hundreds of other persons following the same approach of appealing to a nameless, faceless entity you cannot contact until they contact you - if they ever do. You stand a very good chance of being lost in the crowd.

Is it possible that this is the situation which is causing you discouragement?

Your only options are a) stop looking entirely, which I certainly do not recommend, or b) pursue a different path, a new path of possibilities. I do not have space to go into detail about these other paths in this blog entry, but here are some ideas to consider:

1. Start your own contract business. I discuss how to go about this at the end of Hired!

2. Contact every temporary agency in your area. Pursue temporary opportunities in the area you have been working, and in other related areas so you can broaden your job history and prepare yourself for new job opportunities.

3. Personally seek out hiring managers in companies you would like to work for, and let them bring in their HR after the manager has first talked to you. This can be as simple as walking into a retail business and asking to speak with a department manager, or it can be as involved as asking for referrals from business contacts in your life. I found a client by asking my dentist if he had any patients running financial or medical businesses. He gave me a name and number, I called and said I was referred by Dr. Jones, and that conversation led to another that led to an engagement.

4. Read all of your local business magazines. Look for the names of "People on the Move" and call them. Tell them you saw the announcement of their promotion on the magazine. They will be flattered. After all these magazines are really "vanity" publications. People call the magazine to put these announcement into the publication just for the purpose of marketing their promotion, award, or accomplishment.

5. Follow TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines to get names of anyone who is already employed in a decision-making capacity in any business or industry you want to work in. Call them. Call the company's main number and ask the receptionist to connect you with them. If you get a voicemail announcement do not leave a message, and if you are really lucky the person's voicemail will give you their direct extension so you can bypass the receptionist on the next attempt. In Hired! I give examples of how to introduce yourself in 10 seconds. I did this for years in my business. It really is not difficult to get past the initial anxiety!

There are so many ways to do job search differently than you might be thinking. Is it possible for you to stretch a bit and try something totally new? Of course it is. Think about it, write down a little plan, and get started. If you mess up the first few calls that is part of learning. But you won't get any learning until you start!

Dressing for Your Job Interview

The phrase "dress appropriately" is easy to grasp if you think of it this way: if you dress for your interview in the clothing you will wear on the job, then you are under-dressed for the interview. If you dress one level up from what you would wear if you work for them, you are dressed appropriately.

For example, for a man, if the normal workday clothing is jeans and work boots (as in construction or trades), or just casual clothing (as in a shopping mall retail store) then one level up is a dress shirt and complementary tie, and chinos or Dockers slacks.

If the workday rule is business casual (as in most office work) then one level up is a suit.
The only exception to "one level up" is if the workday attire is a suit (as in more formal office environments). In this case you just need to wear a suit—not a tuxedo!—for your interview.

Guys, make sure your hair and facial hair is trimmed, your shoes are polished, and do not wear any cologne, after-shave, or scented hair-gel. Many people are very sensitive to various scents, and what you think smells wonderful could make your interviewer nauseous. You don't want to be turned out of the interview right after you walk in.

If you are a woman applying for a professional or management position, wear a neutral- or darker-color suit and high heels. If you are applying for a retail or any customer-facing position you have an almost infinite number of options from dresses to pant suits, and from high-heels to low-heels. Make sure your shoes are polished, and please do not wear any perfume! None! Not even a smidgen! Remember your make-up may have a perfumed scent in it.

Ladies, the quickest path to not even finishing the interview, much less getting a job offer, is to wear clothing that is too tight, too short, too revealing, or just too provocative. In other words, "too anything." If you have any question about whether an item is "too anything," then it probably is.

Body Ornamentation

Body adornment is common today in the under-30 age group, but most office or retail environments are focused on their clients and customers, not on your epidermal artwork. Unless you are applying for a job in a tattoo parlor, or as a bouncer in a Rave club, cover all of your tattoos with clothing or concealment-grade makeup. Remove all piercing jewelry. Women can still wear pierced ear rings, but both men and women should remove every other visible piercing.

Dealing with Job Gaps in Your Resumé

All potential employers look for evidence of job stability and progress in a candidate. But not everyone has a continuous job history. In these turbulent times, employment gaps are no longer the stigma they were in earlier, more economically stable times. Since job gaps are impossible to hide in the recommended reverse chronological resumé format, you need to think carefully about how to handle these on your resumé.

I know a woman who made a number of spectacularly bad decisions in her young adult life. As a result she did not have a continual working history. She had some very large gaps between the jobs that she could safely list on her resumé. How did she resolve this so potential employers would not immediately toss her resumé into the trash?

We talked about what was going on in her life during these times, and what her current goals were. She had resolved to get her life back on track even if she had to start in entry-level jobs until she learned new skills. So, we recast her sparse resumé to focus on the jobs she had held successfully and the accomplishments she could honestly talk about in an interview. For the three-year period when she was not working, we simply stated "Out of job market." No explanation of why, no spin to make up some justification—just an honest statement that between date X and date Y she was not working.

Why was this a good decision? Remember that the purposes of the resumé are to create interest in you as a candidate and as a person, and to lead to a face-to-face interview. Stating "Out of the job market" was both accurate and honest. The reader would perceive that she did not try to hide the gap. Now it was guaranteed to be one of the first areas explored during a face-to-face interview, so she just needed to be properly prepared to answer that inevitable question. If you have gaps in your job history, be honest and list them. And be prepared to give an explanation when you get your interview.