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…p-l-e-a-s-e… Don’t spend your time trying to prepare to answer oddball or dumbass interview questions… publications like Glassdoor.com publish oddball and crazy questions that they claim hiring or interviewing authorities ask…

… You can spend your time worrying about how you would answer questions like, “does life fascinate you?”…or “how would you get an elephant into a refrigerator?”… or “how many planes are currently flying over Kansas?”…but people who ask these kind of questions are rare…

Best spend your time focusing on what you can do for the company that nobody else can… most people don’t spend enough time focusing on this kind of question…

Any interview or hiring authority that is so egotistical to ask these kind of “I just want to trick you” questions may not be the kind of person you work for… they are more interested in tricking you than they are in finding out if you would be a good employee…

I had a candidate sometime back who got asked one of these off the wall questions and simply asked the authority, with a smile, “what does that have to do with job?”… The hiring authority thought she had lots of courage to ask that in a really nice way…

These questions may very well be amusing… but don’t get hung up

In 1999 a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Dan Simons and a colleague,Chris Chabris published a result of a study on selective attention. They coined the phrase “inattentional blindness.” They asked subjects to watch a video of six people passing two basketballs. One team was dressed in white shirts and the other team was dressed in black shirts. The subjects were instructed to count how many times the three players wearing white shirts passed the basketball while ignoring players wearing black as they passed their own ball. In the middle of the video a person wearing a gorilla suit walked into the picture, beat its chest and walked off. They found that 50% of the subjects failed to notice the person in the gorilla suit.

This phenomenon has often been cited by attorneys questioning witnesses to a crime. It is been proven over and over that at least 50% of the time, the viewers of an activity, especially a fast moving activity, like a crime, don’t remember seeing what was right in front of them.

So how does this affect your interviewing? Well, it’s really quite simple. You need to be aware that any interviewing or hiring authority has a number of key issues that they are “watching” for. These issues can range anywhere from looking for a particular type of experience all the way to trying to avoid someone who has had too many jobs, lives far away from the place of employment, or doesn’t have a degree.

Candidates can do the same thing. They will often tell us that they want to “avoid” one or two particular issues that they think had something to do with the “bad experience” that they just had at the company they are leaving or have left. For instance, candidates who had to leave a small company for any reason tell us that they want to go to work for a big company with stability. They think there is more stability in larger companies than there is in smaller ones. Candidates simply want to avoid what they think they just burned them.

What happens to both parties in situations like this is that they will focus their attention so much on what they want to try to avoid that they miss the “gorrilla.”

I can’t tell you the number of interviewing and hiring authorities who have missed understanding a very important part of a candidates experience or background… the part that could really help them… because they got hung up on focusing on one or two aspects of the candidate they were concerned about. We have candidates who will get so focused on one or two issues of a ccompany, a job or a hiring authority that they miss important qualities of the company.

As a candidate, you need to realize that if you have any risk factors like being out of work for an extended period of time in having had three jobs in three years, being fired, etc. a hiring authority is going to automatically focus on that issue and there’s a good chance they will not see the qualities or experience that make you a good candidate. By knowing this you will be able to emphasize the strengths and qualities so that the hiring authority is not blind to.

Know what your risk factors are in the eyes of the hiring authority. Realize that they may get so focused on those they don’t see the reasons you are a quality candidate. Don’t be a victim of inattentional blindness.

This past week, I just finished listening to Great by Choice by Jim Collins… probably one of the best business books I’ve read in a long time… and I read just about everything anyone suggests

It reminds me that if you are any kind of professional you know that you need to be reading books that relate to your profession all the time… leaders are readers… I’m often blown away by people who are supposed to be professionals who spend their time reading fiction or not reading at all… we all have to be “students” of our game

It also reminded me to emphasize the fact that if you are a candidate looking for a job, you’d best be reading one or two business books that relate to what you do… somewhere along the line one of the interviewing authorities you speak with is going to ask you what business book you’ve recently read and, “how has it had an impact on you and your profession?” If you don’t have a really good answer… I mean you really good answer to this question, you’re going to be caught flat-footed… and worse, if you act like you have recently read a book just to look good and then get asked to describe it in detail, …and when you can’t you will certainly be eliminated as a candidate…

What are you reading?…how has it had an impact on your professional life?

just read advise by a well known author and career adviser…he advises people who are looking for work to “target the top 10 firms you’d like to work for” and agressively pursue them for a job. He communicates the idea that just because you want to work at any organization…they also want you.

Unfortunately, this kind of advice gives people all kinds of false hopes about the reality of this job market. Unfortunately, reality… especially in this market… is not like in the movie Field of Dreams, “if you build it… they will come.” Just because it might be nice to work at a particular place has got nothing to do with reality of finding a job there. Just because you might think it would be peachy to work at a particular place has nothing to do with the reality of them hiring… let alone hiring you.

If people are naïve enough to believe something like this, they quickly find out that the real world doesn’t work this way. Unfortunately, they spend a lot of time and effort before they are deflated and disappointed by reality.

My suggestion would be to target 200 companies… 300… anybody who might listen. Please don’t put your faith in the “Top 10.” If you are an absolute rockstar in your profession, you… or your agent… might have luck doing this kind of thing. If you are like most of us mortals, you’re going to need to go after more organizations than that.

I’m often amazed when I ask candidates who have been looking for a job, especially for some time, “what are your ratios?” They looke at me with a stare and then mumbled something like, “What do you mean?”

I say, “I mean, how many calls you have to make to reach a hiring authority? How many hiring authorities do you have to speak with in order to find ones that are interested in interviewing you? How many of those interviews do you have to go to and get invited back for second and subsequent interviews? And how many second and subsequent interviews do you have to get to get a job offer?”

Continuing with their deer in the headlight stare, they ask something like, “why would I want to know that stuff?” “Because,” I answer “if you want to work a ’system’ of finding a job, you need to keep track of all your numbers. You need to know exactly how many cold/warm calls to hiring authorities you need to make in order to get an interview. You need to know how many interviews you need to get in order to get second and subsequent interviews.. And you need to know how many of those second and subsequent interviews you need to get in order to get a job offer. Ultimately, you need to know how many phone calls you need to make in order to get a job offer.

If you approach finding a job in this way, it truly becomes a “numbers” game. All you have to do is focus on the numbers. It’s certainly easier to control making a number of phone calls than it is to ‘get a job.’ The thought of ‘getting a job’ is overwhelming. The thought of making 150 phone calls is a lot easier to deal with and a lot easier to control.

This is what I mean when I state that, “if you manage the process, the result would take itself.” If you make the right number of calls and say the right thing you reach a certain number of employers…if you speak with that certain number of employers in the right way they will grant you an interview…if you interview well and establish your value to enough employers you will get job offers.

The quality of your interviewing is irrelevant unless you get enough of them.

Do you know your ratios?

Any deep study of the activities of successful business people, athletes and professionals find that in their day-to-day function of what they do they establish rituals and routines…

Rituals and routines are part of most any successful persons daily endeavors… they develop early in their career specific ways of doing things and ways of approaching their sport, their art or their business… these successful people rely on rituals and routines to carry them through the difficult challenges that they face every day… no matter what business or profession you are in there is a great degree of unknown… life, obviously, is a series of ups and downs… there is a lot of what happens to us that we don’t expect and we can’t predict…sometimes even hard to prepare for

The psychological aspect of developing rituals and routines gives us the confidence and dependability of what we do know so that when we encounter difficult or unpredictable situations we can rely on at least the rituals and routines to “carry us”

The same is true in a job search… it is especially true when you are looking for a job full time… one of the biggest difficulties that people encounter in a full time job search is developing a specific system of rituals and routines that will help carry them through the unpredictable results of the interviewing and finding a job…

I recommend in my books and my online program to develop a daily system of rituals and routines that provide a systematic approach to looking for a job that becomes a process… by relying on the process you don’t have to worry about the result…

Rituals and routines would be things like getting up exactly the same time every morning… early every morning… developing routines like prayer, spiritual and psychological readings first thing in the morning… personal disciplines like making your bed every day, dressing in a Business suit and approaching the daily activities of looking for a job in exactly the same way every day… the unknown ups and downs of getting an interview and interviewing well and how long it takes to do that can be offset by a strict regiment of making the same number of calls every day to try to contact hiring authorities, making a presentation of yourself to a prospective employer and making sure those number of calls are sufficient enough to get quality interviews…

An undisciplined approach of waking up at any time that feels good and trying to find a job over the Internet in your house slippers, unbathed and or unshaven isn’t going to cut it…spending time on the golf course to break the monotony of having to look for a job isn’t really going to help… and yet it’s very easy to fall into these kinds of traps

Even if you have a job, you can design rituals and routines for your job search around your daily activities of work…

Relying on rituals and routines will make a phenomenal difference in your job search…

one of our clients recdently hired a candidate…here is the story as to why he hire one and not the other…the lesson is clear…

I recently interviewed two candidates in a final round before making a hiring decision. The position that I had open was for mid-market enterprise companies with between 5,000-15,000 employees. Our industry is in IT services in the cloud, as well as software solutions; all storage and archiving related. In my search I was looking for a hunter with 5-10 years selling IT solutions. Our typical hire has a storage related background, but a solid IT background also seems to fit.

The two candidates both had great track record with achieving their numbers: one in the storage hardware industry, and one in the software industry but with a security background. They were both aware that they were the final two candidates. I went as far as letting them both know where they stood and that this was the final stage before moving forward.

The first candidate that I met with was the one from the storage industry. The interview lasted about 20 minutes. I asked the majority of the questions around his background, what he had done and why he was successful. I got good answers back. I also asked him how he would attack the territory in the first 90 days. The answer was fairly generic and he was done in about 2 minutes. I asked if he had any additional questions and he said no. He did put the close on me 2-3 times during the interview, which was good, but I was really hoping that he was going to probe more about me and the position. I then told him about the remaining next steps, which included an interview with the VP of North American sales and an offer to come out within the next 3-4 days. We ended the interview with an agreement from me to call him that evening with a decision.

I met with the second candidate about 30 minutes later. We sat down and after a few minutes of small talk we started asking me questions. I like this approach because I expect a sales person to probe the customer then to come back with some pertinent information. He asked me questions about each product, calling them by name. He asked about who the competition was for each product. What the selling cycles are, who we sell to and why they buy. I spent a good 20 minutes discussing how we sell our products and who we sell them to. He proceeded to pull out a business plan that he had drafted with what he would do in the first 90 days. This fell in line with what we had been discussing earlier about product positioning and what our sales cycles are like. We discussed this in the first interview and he did his homework for the final interview. Although he was interviewing for a position outside his past market segment, he was able to tie his past experience into what my position was for and what I was looking for. We spent 60 minutes or so discussing my team, our products, the company culture, my management style and how he would fit in very well with what my expectations were. At the end of our interview, when discussing next steps, he proceeded to ask my questions about the VP of North American sales, what he was like, what is past was, what I thought of him and what he should expect from the phone call.

What it came down to is the second candidate treated me like a sales call. He interviewed me, took the time to discuss what I was looking for and was able to discuss how he would fit in with what I as seeking. He was constantly probing for more information and tying that information back to what he could provide to me. He took the time to understand our products, our people, and our culture to really see how great of an opportunity it was. I could really feel his excitement about wanting to join the team and be successful.

…some gal on the Internet and tells people that a job interview is like going on a first date… this is ridiculous… the gal might be a good writer, or a good researcher, or whatever… but don’t buy this garbage!

An interview is not a DATE… an interview is not SOCIAL… an interview is a SALES situation… they’re 43 other people competing for this job… you have to be forceful and aggressive… an interview is NOT a “two-way street” of give-and-take… Until you get to the final interviewing stages it is a “one-way street” and you are doing all of the selling… you gotta be downright pushy… but nice…

P-L-E-A-S-E don’t buy this silly stuff… interviewing is a business deal…PERIOD… certainly you want to get people to like you but you have to show them how you are going to benefit their organization… make ‘em money or save ‘em money…Don’t try to complicated anymore than that

Airports, train stations and bus depots
Taxicabs
limousines
Sporting events
Hospitals… unless you are applying for a job there
social events… Christmas parties… New Year’s Eve parties… picnics …etc.
Automobiles… either yours or the hiring authorities… especially while driving
Personal residences… either yours or the hiring authority’s
Anything outdoors.. Parks, etc.
Over the phone
Starbucks
hotel lobbies
The manufacturing plant floor
Restaurants

Anyplace other than a business office is not optimal!

The Big O…1980…I’m reminded of this song every time I hear a candidate tell me that he or she wants to go back to work for people they’ve worked for before. It happens at least two or three times a month that a candidate registered with our organization contemplates this and asks us about it.

I understand people wanting to do this. They need a job! Most often, they’ve been looking for a job for a period of time and the fear of not finding one weighs heavily on their mind. They get an offer to go back to work for someone that they either left or got laid off from and it looks very tempting.

The vast majority of time when people do this, the “second go round” lasts a shorter period of time and winds up being very strenuous. It’s very much like accepting a counteroffer… the relationship is never quite the same as it was the first time.

Most often, when people go back to work for organizations that they have worked for before, it doesn’t work out very well. The same reasons as to why people left the first time are normally still there. If the separation was an involuntary separation, an employee that was expendable before is certainly expendable again and everyone knows it, including the employee. So, there is an air of distrust and uncertainty in the relationship.

Candidates will often succumb to this enticement simply because they are familiar with the organization and, in a state of emotional strain, the devil they know is better than the devil they don’t know. They end up taking a job because they are at least comforted with the idea of having one.

If you’ve been out of work for an extended period of time and simply need to go to work and this is the only offer that you have received, it’s better than no job. No matter what anybody says or who would rationalize this, it normally doesn’t work. Usually, as with a counteroffer, within six months both the candidate and the employer are disappointed and a candidate is usually back on the market. He or she may keep the job just long enough to find another one, but now they have to explain to prospective employers why they went back to the people they’ve worked for once before.

One of the risk factors they have now created for themselves is that any future prospective employer who interviews them is going to wonder if and when things get difficult the new employee will “go back” again.

Do what you think best, but realize “that loven’ you feeling again” is not normally what was the first time.