Fooling HR

Okay, the title is intentionally provocative: While it is within the realm of possibility, it has become increasingly difficult to hoodwink experienced interviewers. Recently, an HR director recited the few times he had been bamboozled by new hires, but it did not take long to correct his hiring faux pas. To minimize future missteps, he implemented a multi-tiered hiring process.

Statistically speaking—I hate citing statistics—but once an interviewer surpasses approximately 300 interviews, the recruiter encounters repetitive behaviors, responses and outliers. Once armed with such experience, the interviewer can zero in on a candidate in as little as five or six probing questions.

There is nothing magical about interviewing. As the quantity of interviewing sessions increase, fewer surprises surface. Seasoned corporate screeners will encounter everything. By 300, they have heard it all, often countless times.

At this quantity, behavioral patterns emerge. When the interviewer is attentive to behavioral responses, and then compares those patterns to previous applicants, accurate conclusions follow. We know, for example, that most people will respond to a direct question honestly. That same question, asked indirectly however, will produce a substantially less truthful response.

Example: “Do you have a criminal record?” All but an outlier will respond to this truthfully. Should the question be posed indirectly, “Is there anything negative in your background, we should know about?” When questions are presented in this manner, there is a greater chance job applicants will avoid responding candidly.

For edification, 2% of job seekers qualify as outliers. If an interviewer were only to screen 50 or 60 applicants, it is conceivable an interviewer might not encounter one. By the time the individual reaches 100 or more interviewers however, the statistical odds become overwhelming. The interviewer will encounter at least one or more, even though the interviewer may have initially failed to identify such individuals at the onset.

 Usually, outliers are exposed during routine background checks. The college has no records the individual graduated, or a criminal records check reveals the individual has an undisclosed substance abuse issue, or the Credit Bureau shows an undisclosed debt problem, etcetera. The rest are subsequently exposed in the workplace.

As a result, skilled interviewers will not rely solely on first impressions. Given enough one-on-one interviews, and the collective experience of hearing evasive or vague responses, skilled interviewers inevitably acquire intuitive instincts. In most cases, their ability to spot subtle, yet reoccurring behaviors prove difficult to conceal.

Copyrighted © 2013 by Robert James

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George Orwell would have lost his mind

George Orwell would have lost his mind

Occasionally, résumé writers will encounter a client who needs to fudge something on a résumé or vitae. Among the professionals in the business, the universal consensus is not to do that. Once upon a time, job seekers ignored such advice, but today, most realize we are living in an Orwellian society running on steroids.

While job seekers still have small amounts of wiggle room, that space continues to dwindle. Virtually everything appearing in one’s résumé these days is subject crosschecks and electronic verification. Beyond a routine background check, a low-end position at Wal-Mart might not be subjected to in-depth scrutiny, but venture into a substantive position, and that definitely would not be the case.

As the level of risks, liabilities and responsibilities for an opportunity increases, the level of probing likewise expands. In addition to merely pulling credit reports and court records, driving records are pulled, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts examined, college transcripts reviewed, and references not only contacted, but the general quality of those individuals listed can be taken into consideration.

Officials within the Bureau of Criminal Investigation inform me that once they have a driver’s license, they have access to your bank information and a whole lot more. Once you sign up for medical coverage—violà, your entire medical history is exposed. Google, by the way, keeps a record on every website you've ever visited—forever.

Once the mounds of easily accessible public information are amassed, it can then be compared to what appears in your résumé. Subtle discrepancies can then be examined and scrutinized. What once might have taken more than a week to gather, evaluate and synthesize can now be electronically processed within 24 hours.

For job seekers attempting to make a drastic career change or use a functional résumé, this poses a significant challenge. (For edification, a functional résumé is used to camouflage a spotty work history, conceal significant time gaps and disguise careers that have regressed.)

In the distant past, the once immensely popular functional résumés were especially favored by those who had done prison time. Today, they have fallen into desuetude with suspicious employers. For those considering a functional résumé, proceed cautiously. The use of a functional format is tantamount to a declaration that you have something serious to hide.

Shifting careers and designing an effective résumé pose a twofold obstacle. The first challenge is putting the experience down in an electronic format—and, doing it convincingly! Therein lies the rub. When you encounter such an epiphany on your road to Damascus, the time has arrived to see a professional writer. 

How does one persuade an inquisitive employer that just because you were good at one thing, you will excel at something different? Even worse, how does one convince a technologically perceptive employer to take a risk with someone who lost interest in a previous career?

It is highly unlikely George Orwell would have been able to function in today’s artificial intelligence, Google-logic environment. IT Developers tell me they have opened a Pandora gateway into everyone’s private lives. It ain’t like it used to be folks, and the bread crumbs you've scattered along life’s highway includes your social DNA.

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 © 2012 by Robert James. James is a professional résumé guru and interview trainer who works for clients worldwide. He can be emailed at: rjames279@gmail.com.

Fear of the Job Market

 Not everyone comes to a résumé writer for résumés. Sometimes job seekers feel overwhelmed, and need to confess their fears. In those situations, the writer has to change wardrobes to serve as “lay priest” or psychoanalyst.

    There is a long index of phobias floating around. The more popular ones include claustrophobia (fear of confined space), arachnophobia (fear of spiders) and laliophobia (fear of speaking). While the list of phobias stretches well into the hundreds, there does not appear to be a fear expressly linked to the job market.

    This fear may be a compilation of other phobias. These might include such fears as hypenglyophobia (the fear of responsibility), kainophobia (the fear of anything new) or perhaps xenophobia (the fear of strangers or the unknown), and kakorrhiophobia (the fear of failure).

    According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 5.3 million Americans suffer from some type of social phobias. I am lumping fear of the job market into mix. While I am not a licensed psychoanalyst, I will hazard a wild guess and declare it a combination of fears most closely aligned to the fear of failure and fear of the unknown.

    An individual who suffers from job market phobia is strikingly similar to a person rowing a boat with one oar in the water. Up close, it appears the individual is making a cogent effort to move the boat forward—in this case, a job search—but as you watch from a distance, you realize the boat is merely traveling in circles.

    Job market fear is not as uncommon as one might suspect. I have seen some of my finest résumés go unused. This usually becomes known when a client informs me nine months or two years into the employment voyage that the résumé was never put to use.

    Asking why rarely produces a candid response. The litany of answers range from, “I put my job search on hold due to (fill-in the blank),” “I’ve decided to make a career change,” and “The right opportunity hasn’t presented itself.”  There have been other responses, of course, but these are among the most common.

    Fear in any form ultimately imposes lifestyle restrictions, capable of robbing one of mental and physical peace. The perceived danger—usually imaginary, controls one’s otherwise proactive job search. Common symptoms of fear include elevated heart rate, excessive perspiration, trembling, anxiety attacks and breathing difficulty.

    Once fear of the job market becomes entrenched, a new routine becomes established to avoid these side effects. For the job seeker with only one oar in the water, traveling in circles becomes the new normal. As for the esoteric phobia involved—be that anything new, the unknown or failure, never needs to be addressed.

    To paraphrase FDR, the only thing job hunters have to fear is fear itself.

10 Laws of Job Hunting Physics

To paraphrase one of Isaac Newton’s Laws of Physics, and apply the theory to job-hunting, we can restate it as: A job search in motion tends to stay in motion, while a job search at rest tends to stay at rest.

Putting a job search in motion from an inert state demands a horrendous effort. Most job seekers are not up to the challenge. In the alternative, they saunter down the paths of least resistance.

Many might think that those who are unemployed will have more time available to devote to a comprehensive job search. Reality shouts otherwise. Hosts of other issues kick in, which in turn slow down job-hunting motion.

The top three motion-slowing issues include fear of failure, lack of networking and poor routines. Volumes have been written on the fear of failure. The synopsis version is that it can result in various stages of depression, panic attacks and irrational behaviors.

As for the lack of networking, that contributes to lost opportunities, as well as a wide assortment of poor strategic planning issues. The problems generated from poor networking are exhaustive.

Aside from networking, poor routines result in lack of organization, time management and ability to take decisive action. Taken individually, these issues might not spoil a job-search effort, but collectively, they contribute to failure.

Those gainfully employed tend to avoid these issues. Being employed tends to reduce the fear factor. It lowers—but does not necessarily eliminate—the possibility of being able to network effectively. A regimented routine minimizes the negative issues associated with it.

Those factors alone significantly account to why the vast majority of employers prefer hiring the employed rather than the unemployed.

To compensate for these motion-stopping issues, the unemployed job seeker needs to proceed fearlessly, better organized and highly regimented. That, however, is easier to say than implement.

Whether employed or unemployed, here is my short list.

1: Have a strategy! You need to incorporate networking into that plan. Upper management positions trend toward some degree of proactive networking. While networking carries slightly less importance as one proceeds farther down the ladder, it remains high on the list and cannot be overlooked or undervalued.

2: Health Issues affect both physical appearance, as well as internal inertia. Job-hunting is strenuous, time consuming and stressful. The ability to cope with job-seeking stress alone is a monumental challenge.

3: Job-hunting discipline includes maintaining regimented daily routine. Daily routines abruptly change the moment an individual becomes unemployment. New, productive routines need to be reestablished to avoid motion-slowing routines.

4: Reassess marketable experience. This poses a major challenge for those trying to create a résumé with little or no job experience. That said, even those with volumes of experience fail to properly assess and present what is salable in a changing market.

5: Develop marketing tools. This includes not only the résumé, but up-to-date references, thank-you notes and ongoing research. While a well-crafted, easy-to-read résumé tends to generate more interviews, far too much time is wasted on reinventing résumés. Clear and concise content continues to trump overly cluttered, busy and fancy layouts.

6: Poor eating habits plague the nation. With 40% of the population qualifying as obese, and with employers overwhelming desiring to reduce health and absentee costs, I rest my case. (As an aside, the average citizen consumes 55 gallons a year of poisonous sugar-loaded beverages. Hum—someone is drinking my share.)

7: Deficient job interviewing skills will torpedo even the most intriguing résumé. Unless you interview job candidates regularly, you may not know the statistics, but 80% of all job candidates interview poorly. Those who interview well can easily surpass those more qualified.

8: Your job interviewing wardrobe is usually the second impression, only proceeded by the quality and content of your résumé. Most job candidates dress appropriately. Some show up looking drop-dead gorgeous. A solid 10% show up for interviews as if the scheduled ordeal had inconveniently interrupted their afternoon gardening project.

9: Cover letters, while they remain important, it ranks lower today than they did a generation ago. If your résumé needs to be easy-to-read and concise, than it quadruples for covers. Therein lays the challenge. Ninety percent of covers are not read due to length. Think of your cover letter as a clever Tweet! If it’s long—it’s wrong.

10: Your public records can be a hidden deal killer. This encompasses a whole host of sins, ranging from your credit report and court documents to your LinkedIn account. The higher on the food chain you proceed, the greater the possibility this information will be scrutinized. 

Newton would not have applied his Laws of Physics in this manner, yet the concept applies nonetheless. To keep your job search in motion, one needs to have all the above in motion. Keep moving on all possibilities and venues. Seek counsel wisely and leave nothing to chance. 

Using Company Email: A No-No

Using Company Email: A No-No

Seven times this year, I have received job-hunting correspondence from individuals using their company email accounts. My alarm bell goes off, even if theirs didn’t. I caution potential clients not to do that. Most responded with (a) “It’s perfectly okay, the company is aware I am seeking new employment,” or (b) “My immediate superior said it was okay.”

Neither argument carries water. First, no company email is private—especially to email administrators. Second, most companies have a written policy against using company equipment and services for private use. Job-hunting qualifies as private use.

Just because a superior grants you permission, that individual may not have the discretionary authority to override written company policy. Someone further up the food chain could conceivably step in and overnight expedite your termination for cause. (I have seen this happen!)

There is, however, another important reason for not using your company’s email for job-search purposes. Whenever you opt to use the company’s email, potential employers routinely jump to their own conclusions. They view such usage from an entirely different perspective.

From their viewpoint, you—the job candidate appears to be acting carelessly, or they think you are probably abusing or violating company policy, or perhaps you are merely lazy. Take your pick: Which of those images did you want to project?

Best solution: Do not use a company’s email account, and thus eliminate all the above potential hazards.