Preparing for Your Interview

This is the season of job interviews. I confess that I am alternately amused and appalled at the self-destructive behavior of young people trying to enter the job market. So, I am offering this series on the proper performance of a job interview: preparing for the interview, the actual interview event itself, and what follow-up the candidate must carry-out.

Take Your Resumé

Even if you have already submitted a resumé with an earlier application, set out two or three printed copies of your resumé to take to your interview. The person interviewing you might have six other people to interview the same day as your session. It is not uncommon for an interviewer to accidentally misplace a resumé. You also might be interviewing with multiple persons over several hours, so take extra copies so you will have one for each person you talk with plus one for you to refer to, just in case.

Organize Your Interview Logistics

The following recommendations may seem like overkill, but you will realize how prudent they are when you have two or more interviews in a week, or if the day of your interview turns into pure chaos.

Capture in one location the specific information about each interview:

• The name of the company you are interviewing with
• The date, time, and location of the interview
• The name and position of the person who will be interviewing you, if you know
• A phone number for the person who will be interviewing you, or the Human Resources office (so you can call them if you get delayed in traffic, or get sick)
• Parking information if you will be driving to the location

Research the Company

The single biggest error candidates make in interviews is also the most devastating: they walk in knowing little or nothing about the company whose time and resources they are consuming. Too many people sit down with an attitude that the company is in total control, and the company is the only party making a job decision. Wrong! The interview is a forum just as much for you to decide if this company is right for you, as for them to decide if you are right for them.

Show the interviewers you can do your homework. When you walk into that interview you should have a clear view of the company's locations, branches, product lines and growth profile. Start with the company's own website. Product lines and locations are usually prominent on the site.

For publicly-traded companies you should additionally search the major financial websites for corporate information to validate what you learned on the corporate website. These financial sites include:

• Yahoo Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com)
• Forbes (http://www.forbes.com)
• Money (http://money.cnn.com)
• Google Finance (http://www.google.com/finance)

With this knowledge, even at a high-level, you will be able to ask informed questions when you actually get into the interview, and you will leave a very positive impression.

Dressing Smart

Choose your clothing very, very carefully. The basic rule for both men and women is "dress up one level." This admonition 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.

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.

I have many more observations in Hired! including what you should use to take notes during the interview, the payment etiquette of lunch and lunch-time interviews, and how to prepare your list of references. Don't be unprepared for your interview.

The Personal Connection

Many years ago I learned a deceptively simple lesson that changed my life. After graduating from college with my first degree I actually got a job as a milkman. Yeah! I drove a truck and delivered milk, bread, and other items to residences and businesses. One morning I was riding with the man who was training me. He took a basket of items into a small store and I waited in the truck. And I waited...and waited. I was very impatient. When he finally stepped back into the truck my first words were something like, "What took so long? We're way off schedule now." He looked at me with some deserved disdain and and simply said, "Son, a customer will leave you, but a friend won't."

I have never forgotten those words. Everything in business, in job search, in interviewing is made immensely easier when a personal connection exists, no matter how tenuous that connection might be. This is why I wrote Hired! around the theme that job search is really relationship building.

In my blog on Tell Me About Yourself  I cover the kinds of answers you should avoid in a job interview, and some productive ways to raise interest in you without possibly offending your interviewer. But simply telling the interviewer about you is very one-sided.

Here is a scenario that may allow you to establish a more personal connection if the right elements are available, so this connection is more two-sided. Be aware, however, that if you do not have a genuine interest in people you will probably come across as stiff and manipulative if you pursue this approach.

Let's assume you are being interviewed by Ms. Johnson. If you are in Ms. Johnson's office look around for items that obviously reflect personal aspects of Ms. Johnson. You might notice photos of the beach, or a mountain climb. Or you might notice pictures of children on her desk. Perhaps one is a sports picture of a 9 year-old boy in a baseball uniform or a 14 year-old girl in a ballerina dress.

When she asks you, "Tell me about yourself," just pause for a moment and say, "I would love to, and I know we are going to talk alot about the job opening and what ABC Company is looking for. But perhaps you could first tell me a little about Ms. Laura Johnson? I notice the pictures on your desk. Are they your children? Are they fond of sports and dance?"

Or, "Is that a picture of you hanging off the side of the mountain?"

That is all you have to say. Just let the conversation go where it will. I recently walked into the office of a manager whose team I am helping with a big shift in how they deliver their software. I had never had more than an email exchange with him. I immediately noticed some U.S. Air Force plaques on his bookcase. After our handshakes and initial introductions I asked, "Were you Air Force? I'm an Air Force brat." The next 10 minutes were on his fighter pilot training and military life for children of officers. It was a great way to begin.

Eventually you will talk about yourself, but at the very least the two of you have had a brief exchange outside the narrow scope of the job opening. I am a techie but I really like people, and learning about what they do and who they are. My work decisions are based at least as much about the people I meet in the company as they are by the actual job responsibilities. In fact, the job in which I am currently working was a very difficult decision for me until I met the man I would be working for. He was the deciding factor because we have some common interests, and our chemistry was great. So keep your eyes and ears open for a way to make a personal contact even if briefly. It will make both of you more fully defined in each other's mind.

Tell Me About Yourself

One of the original reasons why resumé examples always recommended listing your hobbies and interests was for the reader to get a look into the real you as a person. However, today your hobby or interest may violate someone's sensibilities of political correctness. So this is why I always recommend you omit this personal information on a resumé.

But when you walk into an interview one of the questions you are virtually guaranteed to hear is, "So, tell me about yourself." What should you do? Well, first you should think about your answer before the interview.

Your answer should be honest, but it should not be too revealing. Let me explain. As I discuss in detail in Hired! there are certain questions that under Federal law an interviewer is not allowed to ask. These are questions that have no relevance to your ability to do the job you are interviewing for, but may consciously or unconsciously provide information to disqualify you from consideration.

Your response to "Tell me about yourself" should avoid providing answers to these questions that have not been asked. The topics you should avoid providing information about are

• Nationality
• Religion
• Age
• Gender issues
• Sexuality issues
• Marital and family status
• Health and physical abilities
• Residence, legal and military status

Of course it is prudent to avoid projecting political and economic biases as well because the person you are talking to may be on the other end of the political or economic spectrum.

So, what could you talk about? There is no one-size-fits-all formula because each of us is unique, but words matter and they matter a lot. I suggest that you prepare an honest and informative, but non-provocative, answer that you have scrubbed of content in any of the areas above.

For example, I have a single statement that I use as my answer: "I love puzzles and I have collected take-apart puzzles for many years. I like to go to the gym and I still play soccer in an over-30 league. I serve as assistant coach for a youth soccer team. And I am a real techie at heart. I am always reading technical material both about programming but also in other areas of science."

Any activity that involves serving others in a neutral setting, such as being a soccer coach, will create a positive impression. I do not, however, tell them that the youth soccer team is in a Christian soccer league. Am I afraid to say that? Not at all, but I don't want to add unnecessary "color" to the description that might raise a negative response in the other person's mind. If I am not the right person for the job I want that decision to be made strictly on the basis of my skill, knowledge, and experience. Period.

Note that I end my statement with a personal activity that relates directly to the technical nature of the job I would be applying for. Again, I am always thinking of a structure that will lead back to the reason why I am in that person's office. Otherwise, I could finish with something as personal as "...and I love Chinese food," but there would be no tie-in, would there? And is loving Chinese food really going to enlist a positive impression in the interviewer?

You are going to be asked this generic question about yourself. I have heard it as "Tell me what makes Gary really tick," or "What do you enjoy doing outside work." I strongly suggest you have the answer that is correct for you, long before you hear the question.

Finding the Right Career?

A brief article titled "Finding the Right Career" in Investors Business Daily captured my attention.

Test Drive Other Options

Thomas Maple is a college counselor who made the interesting comment, "A career decision-making process should involve many hours of exploration over the course of weeks and months." Agreed. In Hired! I discuss the danger of a career approach exactly opposite to this advice: thinking of oneself only as your most recent job title. As I talk with people engaged in job search and reemployment, I continually emphasize my common theme that everyone is an owner of skills and knowledge, and not just a job title. All of us can identify job and career paths that intrigue us. To actually carry out this exploration Maple offers three imminently practical paths:

1. Talk with people already in that potential job area and get real information from people with "boots on the ground."
2. Shadow or apprentice yourself to people already in that job area so you can actually experience what the job is like.
3. Volunteer, especially in pursuing nonprofit organizations, so you can be meaningfully involved in contributing in that job area as you learn about it.

Get a Second, or Third, Opinion

Another comment that impressed me was that all of us have blind spots and we can always benefit from an outside perspective from family, friends or colleagues. Maria Moats found herself confronted very early in her career with a dilemma when her father became ill. "Family has to come first," she said, and she had to decide between continuing her work in Dallas, or quitting to move to her family in El Paso. Or so she thought. When she shared her decision to quit with her partner, his unemotional and detached perspective uncovered a third option: Moats could transfer to the company's El Paso office. As she summarized this she said that an inexperienced worker, "My perspective was limited. I was not thinking about my value to the firm."

It's Your Life - Not Your Parents' or Your Uncle's

Maples makes the terse observation that "A desire to please other people with one's career choice is one of the chief causes of career dissatisfaction." I have a family story that matches this very closely. A relative started his career in engineering but after a couple of years in the engineering world his brain was about to explode. He was pretty miserable. He had not chosen engineering as much as it had been chosen for him. He did his best to conform but the dissonance was just too much. He then applied to and was accepted to law school. He has been in law practice for almost 4 decades now and still loves it. But he still wishes he had been more introspective before spending all that money on his engineering degree.

So be focused, be cautious, and be flexible. Good advice.

More Resumé Overhaul

Adam reached out to me through the recommendation of a common friend. Adam is 20-something and a few months ago finished a Nuclear Medicine degree at a local college. But he was having dismal success in even getting interviews. When we connected by email I asked Adam to send me his resumé so I could get some idea of his education and work background before we talked.

Adam's resumé was pretty much straight out of the 1970s. I do not fault him at all. He is just entering the job market. What absolutely stunned me was he told me one of his instructors had helped construct his resumé. Here are the mistakes I found:

1. The first section was "Objective"  As I discuss at length in Hired! you should not list an "Objective" section. Let your cover letter address your objective for each job to which you submit a resumé.
2. The second section was "Qualifications" and listed his Nuclear Medicine Certificate and other certifications. My concern here is that the reader now has two ancillary sections to look at and skip over to get to the meat of Adam's education and work experience.
3. The third section listed Adam's work experience: primarily the clinical rotations he went through in his degree program, followed by his other jobs over the past few years. Good stuff here but three structural issues jumped out at me. First, the structure of this section was obviously the product of an academic mindset because the content was arranged in outline format [1, a), (1)..]. Recommendation: use simple or even bulleted sentences, but never outline format. Second, there was little mention of responsibilities and accomplishments in his degree activities. Recommendation: tell the reader what you accomplished in each significant activity. Third, his work experience was in a mixed time order. Recommendation: list all work experience in reverse chronological order (most recent to least recent). 
4. The last section of the resumé was "References." Today, readers do not want to see references on a resumé, and do not write "references available upon request." Everyone expects you to be able to provide references if asked.

Adam and I spent quite a bit of time going over these concerns. I provided him the sample chapter on "The Resumé" in Hired! If you would like to read it, you can download the PDF from my Hired! website.

A few days later Adam sent me his revised resumé. Wow! A total overhaul and much more effective. Looking at this new resumé I could see Adam's responsibilities and what he accomplished in each of his job positions. The layout was dramatically more attractive with just enough white space on the page to let the text "breathe" - the words were not too dense and not too sparse.

I suggested one small change to make the content more efficient for the reader, but what Adam put together was terrific, and just in time for him to attend a job fair in Charlotte. With this new resumé he should be creating some interest in potential employers.

The bottom line is that a resumé is a marketing tool and that means it has to create interest about you. If you have been discouraged that you are not getting the response you want, ruthlessly evaluate the first thing you are putting forward to represent you - your resumé.

"I Cannot Afford to NOT Be Assertive"

I've been emailing this week with a reader of Hired! Yusuf is a computer programmer who recently rolled off a large contract job. With additional time on his hands he decided to explore his whole career path. I was very pleased when he shared that he pursued a personality survey such as those I discuss in Hired! He discovered that he is an INFP: Introspective, iNtuitive, Feeling, and Perceiving - a combination characterized as "The Healer." This knowledge has given him new ideas about what kind of work will make him happy.

I was delighted to hear what Yusuf thought was the Big Takeaway for him: "I did really enjoy your book. Throughout the book you demonstrate following up with people and developing relationships with them. You talk about not taking 'No' for an answer and working around this obstacle. At first I was thinking to myself, 'Oh I could never do that. That is too forward for my style.' But after rolling off my last project and going through my exit interview, I realize I CAN'T AFFORD not to be more forward and assertive. You mention in your book at some point that this is going to affect your take home pay. Boy, are you right."

I am grateful that Hired! has provided tangible value to Yusuf. He is intelligent and articulate, and has already started incorporating new options for his next engagement. He has recognized that he does not have to settle for the same old way of thinking. This is why I wrote Hired! and I have great confidence this reader is going to do just fine.

Keep It On the Record

When you begin making contact with any company, whether face-to-face or remotely, you can sabotage your progress in several, effortless ways. I see multiple examples of these mistakes committed by many job seekers, some of whom become the unemployment statistics you read in articles about people who have not been able to find work for 28 weeks, or for a year or more.

The simplest, avoidable mistake is to not make notes.

When you make any contact with a potential employer or lead, you must keep a record of it. You can make your entries on your smartphone, or your tablet computer, or you can use a website like JobKatch (www.jobkatch.com). You can go low-tech and use a notebook. If you go this low-tech route get a spiral-bound notebook so the pages don't fall out.

What is critical is that you have a recording mechanism that you can carry with you everywhere, and enter information immediately while it is fresh in your mind. No, you will not remember these details tonight when you plan to transcribe them. Immediacy is paramount so you can keep the information accurate.

For every contact you make, record everything that will provide what you need to follow up on this contact. This should include

• The date of the contact
• The business name and address
• The type of contact (face-to-face, on-line application, or a paper application)

If any part of the contact was face-to-face, capture

• The name of the employee or manager you talked with, and their direct phone number (ask for their business card because people usually put their direct phone numbers and e-mail addresses on their business cards), and
• Your impression of the conversation and anything of interest the contact may have said, even if they told you they are not hiring right now.

I never want you to be guilty of the following scenario: you submit applications on-line at three websites in the morning, you talk with a manager in the afternoon, and the next day you submit a paper application at a local business. Two weeks later you cannot remember what websites or businesses to which you submitted applications, you cannot recall the manager's name or the address of the local business, and you cannot remember the date you did any of these things.

Sloppy execution means sloppy results. Write it down.