Most 3rd-party recruiter interviews set you up for failure with hiring managers.
Before the entire recruiting profession jumps down my throat over that statement – let’s examine this statement in a little more depth.
Most (there are a few exceptions) recruiters conduct “box-checking” interviews. These sound like “Tell me about yourself.” “Have you done this?” “Do you have this skill?” Do you have this knowledge?” “What’s your biggest weakness?” and all the other 20 standard, stupid, inane canned interview questions that have been asked since the beginning of time.
We also published a couple of articles on some of the “other” reasons for shooting yourself in the foot when interviewing. Two of these articles you might be interested in are:
Candidate Interviewing Mistakes
You Can’t Interview Yourself Out of Wet Paper Bag
Most executives and managers tell me that the vast majority of the interviews they’ve gone through with 3rd-party recruiters are a joke. The believe that these sessions are nothing more than “meet-n-greets” where the recruiter is trying to determine if the candidate will embarrass them on the interview.
None of the traditional interview questions get at real success and the ability to translate prior accomplishments to predicting future performance. Very few recruiters have ever been trained, coached, or learned how to measure true performance – or predict future performance based on past success.
So, let’s follow this process logically. The recruiter conducts an interview for their client by box-checking the job description. The candidate is now lulled into the belief that this will be a similar interview with the client.
Wrong.
Most sophisticated hiring executives/managers are going to talk about outcomes and results – the candidate is stunned to be talking about outcomes, results, deliverables, accomplishments, and achievements. The candidate is at a loss to provide 2-3 substantive examples with quantifiable details for each claim.
The candidate was expecting the traditional 20 stupid, inane, canned interview questions.
The recruiter did NOTHING to prepare the candidate for a more rigorous interview.
The best recruiters conduct more in-depth interviews of candidates than their clients will ever conduct. The best recruiters probe deeply and will continue digging until they get the details. The best recruiters triangulate your responses to validate, verify, and vet your claims.
These interviews act as preparation for the real thing.
Box-checking, traditional, stupid, inane, and canned interview questions do you a disservice by lulling you into a false sense of security about the interview questions that will be asked by strong hiring managers and executives.
So, let’s take this to the logical conclusion:
- Assume most recruiters will not ask tough and insightful questions.
- Assume most recruiters cannot prepare you for an interview with a strong hiring manager or executive.
- Assume most recruiters don’t really understand how to probe accomplishments, achievements, outcomes, and results.
- Assume most recruiters don’t understand how to predict future performance.
What can you do to get ready for a “real” interview?
Here are a few proactive ideas:
-
- Read the free popular chapter in our book, “This is NOT the Position I Accepted” titled “Winning the Phone Interview”
- Practice your responses over and over – imagine this is the most important presentation of your life. Practice your responses in front of the mirror, with family, the dog, your cat, friends, neighbors, associates
- Practice some more
- Read item number 1 – master our technique of D.R.E.S.S.U.P. for the phone interview
- Practice some more
- Frame all your responses with as much quantifiable detail as possible, names, starting amounts, ending amounts, budget, savings, number of people on the project, length of time, etc
- Read everything you can on how to interview more effectively
- Practice some more
Don’t blow the interview just because a recruiter didn’t ask you the correct questions. Be proactive in preparing yourself for a more rigorous interview.
Download our FREE popular Phone Interviewing Chapter “Win the Phone Interview”
What’s your experience in working with recruiters?
What percentage of all the recruiters you’ve met – made you work really hard during the interview? How many of those sessions were “meet-n-greets?”
Barry
P.S. Don’t forget to join our LinkedIn Discussion Group where phone interviewing, recruiters, and everything else job search related is thoroughly discussed.
The Myth of Phone Interviewing
Yesterday I phone interviewed a candidate for a search I was conducting for a National Accounts Manager position. The phone interview was with my client – the CEO.
I had already interviewed the candidate by myself for the job. The candidate passed with flying colors. He was specific, precise, gave good examples, was articulate, and provided good validation and verification of his accomplishments.
Here’s what happened: My client started the interview with more open-ended questions than I typically ask.
As a recruiter, my questions are laser-focused, drawing out every detail of an accomplishment and achievement like having blood withdrawn.
I don’t care if candidates are not prepared for my interviews – I’ll extract it out of them like they were sitting in the interrogation room at a local police station. Some of my candidates have indicated these interviews feel like a “soft deposition” (not sure if I could have come up with a better oxymoron).
Unfortunately, most hiring executives and managers don’t dig and probe as deep to validate, verify, and vet candidate accomplishments. Instead, they ask broad high level questions and wait for the candidate to prove how good they are at interviewing.
Yes – I know it’s a travesty for hiring managers to base their assessments on how well candidates interview rather than on the substance of what they have done and what they can do. It’s a fact of life.
We’re trying to change it one interview at a time – getting hiring managers to focus more on measuring whether the candidate can do the job vs. whether the candidate can interview well. Not sure this will happen in my lifetime.
How to Blow the Phone Interview
The candidate choked up. He blew it. He stuttered through the interview. He was disjointed. His thoughts were jumbled. He would get sidetracked and lose the focus on his point. Here was a candidate who made hundreds, if not thousands of presentations to clients. Here was someone with a great track record of success. But he still blew the phone interview.
Why? How could this happen?
It happened because he did not prepare adequately for the phone interview. He never got a chance to get to the first stage of a physical interview. He can ill afford to miss an opportunity like this job after having been out of work for more than a year.
I’m convinced that one of the major reasons a lot of candidates are still looking for a job after 12 months is that they are not prepared for phone interviewing.
He didn’t review his accomplishments. He didn’t rehearse his answers. He didn’t organize his thoughts related to the potential company’s needs.
The interviewer didn’t guide him through the interview – question by question probing for success. Instead, the interviewer conducted a typical interview at 40,000 ft. and the candidate wasn’t prepared for a typical interview of standard, inane, common, and canned interviewed questions. These were the same 20 questions, hundreds of other managers had asked him prior to this interview.
Shame on him.
Death by Phone Interviewing
He tried to “wing it”.
I’ve seen this “death by phone interviewing” over and over again.
Many candidates think that their accomplishments listed in their resume should “stand on their own”. This myth of phone interviewing couldn’t be further from the truth. Keep in mind that you’re primarily being interviewed for how well you make it through the phone interview – not necessarily how good you are as a potential candidate.
If you can’t navigate the dangerous waters of a phone interview, forget about ever getting a job offer – since you’ll not even make it to the face-to-face stage.
Raise Your Chance of Winning the Phone Interview
If you’d like to learn more about how to win in a phone interview, download for FREE the most popular chapter, “Winning the Phone Interview”, of our Job Search Workbook, “This Is NOT the Position I Accepted”.
Barry
I was reading an interesting blog post, titled “You Can Lose Your Job Over Blog Comments, Too” by a well-known author, Daniel Scocco, who writes about blogging on his DailyBloggingTips.com site. Below is partial reprint of the article:
In the past we have seen people losing their jobs for bad mouthing their companies on Twitter and on blog posts. It turns out that the same can happen with blog comments, even if you are not the one writing the comments!
Confusing? Well, here is what happened. Around one month ago Skype hired Madhu Yarlagadda, a former Yahoo! employee, to be the new Chief Development Officer. Once the news got out, TechCrunch wrote a post reporting the news.
Once the post was a live a bunch of people started leaving comments criticizing and openly insulting Madhu Yarlagadda. These were presumably people who had worked with or for him in the past, and they were claiming he was “dishonest,” “political” and things like that. You’ll still find some of the comments on the post, but the heaviest ones were deleted by TechCrunch, since Madhu threatened to take legal action.
Long story short, the thing blew out of proportions, and as the NY Times reported today, “the comments caught the attention of Skype executives who became concerned about their new hire, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.”
The result? Madhu left the company just one month after joining.
The takeaway message? I am guessing there are many. For one, people are reading blogs, including the comments! Another one would be: be careful with what you put on the Internet.
Here are my comments on this blog post:
As an executive recruiter, I don’t see a lot of this public bashing going on (yet). I do perceive that the increasing ability for individuals to communicate through social media will increase “haters” comments. However, most people will only post “hater” comments when they’ve been mistreated, abused, and wronged.
Imagine all those employees out there who’ve been mistreated, abused, wronged, stomped on, screwed over, back-stabbed, lied to, and humiliated by former bosses. Imagine the ability of these folks to go on-line and vent – just like in this case.
I’m a firm believer of “what goes around – comes around”. You mistreat people – it will come back to bite you.
Here’s a good example: I’m a high school basketball coach. Our former varsity coach left to go to another school. Before he left, he gave an “unfavorable” comment in a published interview about our parents, administration, and players. Some of our parents and players also felt he had wronged them over time.
When the local paper published their announcement of his new position, parents commented on the on-line version of the article – it was a nasty, drag through the mud, public dogfight. The varsity coach almost lost his new job. At a minimum, he goes into this new job with a huge cloud over his head and is now under the microscope from parents, school administration, and players. His reputation is damaged and those “comments” are indexed forever on-line. Probably not the way anyone would like to start a new job.
Moral of the story – be careful how you treat others. “What goes around – truly does come around.” And with the rising trend of people engaging in social media, including blog reading, you run the danger of having your “mistakes” come back and bite you – or at the very least – haunt you!
Are you at risk in your job search of negative comments and information following you around?
Is your reputation being damaged without your knowledge?
Have you done something to encourage people to post angry and negative comments about yourself?
Did you know that more and more employers are checking out your on-line reputation before hiring you?
When was the last time you conducted a check-up on your on-line reputation for your job search?
Barry
P.S. Conducting an assessment of your job search preparation might help to highlight potentially damaging or negative information that could impact your job search. Click here to take our Job Search Self-Assessment yet?
Don’t even think about trying this technique unless you’re prepared for an employer to offer you a job.
I was speaking with a client a few days ago and he told me a story about a candidate he had just hired for a sales position. She had lost her job at a company who was not a direct competitor, but was providing services at a different distribution level in a tangential industry. (I amaze myself sometimes with my ambiguity).
She had sent her resume to the CEO requesting an interview. He blew her off – wrong skill set – wrong industry – wrong level in the distribution/supply chain. And to top it off – he didn’t have a current opening.
She was persistent. She began an aggressive campaign of sending him letters detailing why he needed to hire her in his sales department.
She had conducted extensive research on the company, talked with their suppliers, talked with their customers, and found people within the company (using LinkedIn of course).
She described in “precise” detail the problems she perceived, the steps that needed to be taken, and where she could help to resolve those problems.
Over the course of a few interviews, she became more and more specific about how she could make a difference – through fact-finding in the interviewing, she collected great information.
The company was still undecided (hard to believe). Finally, she sealed the deal by preparing a plan of action of what she would do in her first 90 days. She convinced the company to allow her to present her plan at a meeting. Upon hearing exactly how she would translate her prior experience into actionable steps in this new company, they hired her.
That’s how targeted job search works.
What’s the alternative? The alternative is the shotgun scatter method to job search used by many job seekers. Under the shotgun scatter model, you send out hundreds of standard cover letters and resumes to every company that remotely includes a keyword of interest in their ads. 99.99% of these end up in the trash can. You just wasted 20 hours of your week responding to job ads for which you had no chance of ever making it to the stage of an interview.
Wouldn’t your time be spent more productively targeting jobs, opportunities, and companies – rather than wasting time on the shotgun scatter model of job search?
Discover if you’re job search is effective by downloading our FREE Job Search Plan Self-Assessment. Discover if you’ve got all the elements in place to target the perfect job.
Barry
I recently conducted a non-scientific poll using LinkedIn. 912 people responded to the poll and the results follow with some commentary on the results.
The only question asked was, “How long have you been unemployed and looking for a job?” Since most of the people on LinkedIn tend to be professionals, one can draw the conclusion that the majority of the people responding have a college degree, include all functional departments within a company, and that the respondents range from entry level professionals to the CEO suite.
Overall results are:
9% under 60 days
18% 3-6 months
12% 7-9 months
9% 9-12 months
51% over one year
Many of the comments from the respondents would indicate that some have been unemployed for more than 2 years.
Breaking these numbers down further, 39% of the respondents were female and 61% were male according to LinkedIn. There was almost no difference between females and males out of work for more than a year with 52% for females and 51% for males. The other lengths of time were also very similar between females and males.
The most controversial part of the poll was how LinkedIn broke the number down by age. Of all of the comments received, this was the topic that received the most discussion. For the most part, people commenting clearly thought age discrimination was alive and well. As a recruiter for the last 30 years I’m not sure this is accurate.
Of those 18-24 years old, 50% have been unemployed for more than a year, 22% for 3-6 months, 17% for less than 60 days and the balance of 11% between 7-12 months.
Of those 25-34 years old, 41% were more than one year, 19% for 3 -6 months, 18% for less than 60 days, and the remainder of 22% between 7 – 12 months.
Of those 35-54 years old, 49% were more than one year, 19% for 3-6 months, 11% for less than 60 days and 21% between 7 -12 months.
Of those 55 and older, 55% were more than one year, 16% 3 -6 months, 6% less than 60 days and 23% between 7-12 months.
It doesn’t surprise me that the largest number of people unemployed for more than a year are in the over 55 age group. I would expect this to be the case. Granted, there may be some age discrimination going on, but for the most part this age group is the highest paid group and the most senior on the corporate ladder. It is for these reasons I believe this is the largest group. Our recruiting business is primarily mid-sized company executives. Generally these executives take the longest amount of time to come back from a recession. I started recruiting in 1980, so this is my 4th or 5th recession as a recruiter, and in all previous recessions this is the last group companies hire. Not the oldest, but the most experienced and most highly compensated. In today’s world, a new phenomenon is taking over with companies bringing on interim or temporary executives instead of out right hiring them.
I don’t see age discrimination when the age group of 18-24 has only 5% less looking for more than one year than the 55+ group and a 1% difference for 34-54 group. In most cases this would be within the margin of error. I think it has more to do with experience. The 18-24 age group typically has the least amount of experience and those 55+ typically have the most. Companies tend first to hire in the middle of the bell curve before moving to the outer extremes.
Regardless of how one wants to view the results, the fact is that the largest group in every age group is more than one year. To me this is the most important information coming from this poll. I wonder how much longer than a year have possibly many been looking and how many have just given up?
Unemployment is alive and thriving at all age levels. Unemployment doesn’t appear to care about your age all that much.
If you would like to see the results of this poll for yourself CLICK HERE.
If you would like some free tools to help you get out of your job search regardless of how long you have been looking CLICK HERE to download our LinkedIn Profile Assessment and CLICK HERE to download our Job Search Self- Assessment Scorecard. Both of these tools will help you to identify key areas to improve your job search.
I welcome your comments and thoughts.
Brad Remillard
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Comments (1)
A lot of candidates have given up on LinkedIn.
I probably speak with 20-30 executive candidates a week who’ve been out of work over a year. When I ask about their thoughts of using LinkedIn to find a job – I can almost hear the frowns and sour expressions over the phone.
Have you given up?
Are you getting job leads and referrals through LinkedIn?
If you are getting an adequate level of job leads and referrals – STOP now – No need to read further.
If on the other hand – you’re not getting enough job leads and referrals, let’s discuss how you can give a “booster shot” to your use of LinkedIn as a powerful tool in your job search.
Before we delve deeper into this amazing tool – I would like to suggest you download our FREE LinkedIn Profile Self-Assessment. Thousands of candidates have taken the LinkedIn Profile Self-Assessment and have dramatically improved their chances of being identified in a search.
LinkedIn Job Search Metrics
Let’s define some metrics related to your LinkedIn activities. In surveys and informal research (speaking to thousands of executive candidates over the last 12-18 months), here are some average metrics:
- 25 new connections (relevant to your search) per week
- 30-40 searches weekly of which your profile was included in the search
- 15-20 direct views of your profile weekly off of searches
- 5-7 direct inquiries per week from recruiters, hiring managers, or HR staff.
- 2-3 phone interviews per week based on recruiters/HR finding your resume on LinkedIn.
if you could obtain these metrics for investing 10-12 hours per week on LinkedIn, would the investment be a good use of your time?
Let’s tackle the first element on the assessment – your complete work history. I’m probably sounding like a broken record – you’ve heard me say it over and over again – LinkedIn is one of the greatest tools ever created for Job Search.
The problem is like most tools – you’ve got to practice using it, you’ve got to have the skill to use it properly, and it takes time to truly master how it can help your job search.
Let’s step through line-by-line the various elements on our LinkedIn Profile Self-Assessment. Upon finishing this blog series, you’ll have the knowledge and skills to master LinkedIn to drive the type of job search metrics listed above.
LinkedIn Profile – Work History
Do you have your full work history described in detail under your profile? Does it match up with your resume. Many employers are now verifying that your LinkedIn Profile is consistent with your resume.
Have you benchmarked your career trajectory with other top talent in your industry – functional area? If you network with other people just like you – how do their profiles compare with your profile? Are there people within your functional area or industry that are considered top talent – what do their profiles look like?
When recruiters, hiring managers, or human resource staff are conducting searches on LinkedIn for people just like you – what words and phrases are they using? How would you find out? ASK THEM!
What is the most impressive element of your work history? What’s the one or two things a potential employer/recruiter might say “WOW” if they saw it on your profile? What gave you a “WOW” jolt when you looked at other comparable profiles? Do you highlight these “WOW” factors to stand out.
LinkedIn Profile – Job Lead Generation
Are you searching for everyone at your former companies that are either currently employed at that company or are alumni of the company? This is a group that would be more than willing to help you. You’re part of their village. You’re one of the clan. When learning of your alumni status, most people would go out of their way to help you. Are you searching their connections for leads/connections to potential hiring managers, recruiters, or HR staff?
Are you elaborating upon your background by creating blog posts, Slideshare presentations, and box.net documents? Have you added video and audio elements to your profile to expand upon your work history? Are you sharing this additional content. You should be thinking content marketing and distribution to grab the attention of potential hiring managers, recruiters and HR staff? Are any of your peers using content to improve their exposure and visibility?
When you hear of an job opportunity, do you search your extensive network on LinkedIn to see if someone is connected that might help you. If you’ve focused your efforts on connecting with appropriate job search contacts, after a year I would think your network should be in the 1,500-2,000 contact range with a potential reach in the 250,000 contact range through 2nd level contacts.
LinkedIn Profile – Optimizing for Searches
The final step in leveraging your LinkedIn profile is to optimize it so that you can be “found high in the search results”. My partner, Brad Remillard, just completed a webinar on this topic. You can still buy the presentation and slide deck. It doesn’t do you any good if you come up in a search results on page 14 or 15.
Is your profile embedded in the right places with the right keywords so that when hiring managers, recruiters, and HR staff are conducting searches – you pop up in the first few pages of search results. If you’re profile is not optimized for search on LinkedIn, you’re probably never going to be called or contacted since most individuals in the hiring profession will not bother to view search results 9 pages deep.
A quick and dirty method to determine if your profile is optimized for search is to look at the ratio between total searches done in which your profile appears compared to the total number of direct profile views. If this ratio is less than 50%, your profile is probably not effectively optimized.
In our next blog post, we’ll focus on how to properly convey your accomplishments and achievements in your LinkedIn Profile.
Barry Deutsch
P.S. Don’t forget to download the LinkedIn Profile Self-Assessment so that you can determine your starting point and what is needed to improve your profile so that you stand out to hiring managers, recruiters, and HR staff.
Who are your favorite bloggers that you read regularly to discover how to improve your job search?
Oh wait – let’s take a giant step backwards before we try to answer that question.
Are you searching, reading, devouring the content about effective job search put out by some extraordinary individuals who offer tons of golden nuggets in every post?
Could you rattle off the top ten bloggers on job search who are at the top of their profession? Who are the most respected on the Internet for publishing how-to articles, helpful hints, case studies, and step-by-step tactics to improve your job search?
You might respond back by saying “Barry – I just don’t have the time to search these blogs, follow the various authors, and digest all the information I can on a daily basis – it borders on overwhelming.”
If you’re that person – we have a solution for you.
We’ve created a site that aggregates ALL THE TOP BLOGGERS on job search in one place. No longer do you need to type various search strings into Google, try to remember which blogs you visited, and how to stay current on best practices.
This resource – our IMPACT Hiring Solutions FREE Job Search Resources Blog – pulls the best bloggers into one place, allows you to subscribe by RSS or email, features reviews by Brad and I, and incorporates articles/links from our various job search archives and libraries.
Take a look – subscribe by RSS – and never worry again about being up-to-date on the latest best practices and trends in conducting an effective job search.
The site is http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/freesearchjobresources
Barry
P.S. Don’t forget to join our LinkedIn Discussion Group where we discuss many of the best practice topics related to conducting an effective job search.
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We have a one question poll dealing with unemployment that is currently active. Please take less than a minute and voice your experience. Just CLICK HERE to participate in the poll.
We will post the result shortly, however, once you take the poll you can see the very surprising results. Many have already commented on the results.
Brad
There aren’t too many things one can do only 70% effectively and be successful. Can you imagine doing your job 70% effectively? Would you hire someone that told you in an interview,” I work great 70% of the time?” Would you keep a person working for you the was only 70% effective?
I certainly hope you answered NO to all these.
So why then do so many candidates think they can find a job or conduct a job search at a 70% effective rate? I think in many cases I’m being generous in the 70%. I have worked with many that struggle to get to 50%. Stunning, but true.
Too many candidates just don’t know how to conduct a truly effective job search. That isn’t to say that they don’t try, as I’m sure they do, but trying in a job search isn’t what you are striving to achieve. You shouldn’t be ashamed of this. It is not your area of expertise. It would be like me doing your job. How effective would I be? Probably less than 50%.
In an economy like this in which companies will receive hundreds of resumes, receive numerous referrals, and will interview until the perfect candidate shows up, one can’t afford to be ineffective or inefficient. This is the time to be at your best, 110% not 70% or less.
Here are some simple examples that might help you to identify how effective your job search is (you can download our 8-Point Job Search Self Assessment for free to assess your search CLICK HERE):
- How good is your LinkedIn profile? I have reviewed thousands of profiles and most are incomplete, lacking important data, not optimized for a search, and provide limited information. Yet like it or not, LinkedIn is more powerful than most resume databases.
- Many candidates have no idea how to properly network. Most think it is a numbers game. Meet a lot of people, shake a lot of hands, go to a lot of meetings and so on. WRONG. This is just a bunch of activity. Meaningless activity most of the time. How effective has your networking been for providing the right job leads?
- Candidates focus on only one type of key word search. The electronic type. They optimize the resume for the automated/electronic resume system that scans the resume to identify certain key words. There are two types of key word searches that must be optimized. In my opinion the second one is more important. I have written an article explaining this. CLICK HERE if you want more information on the second type. I don’t have the space here to include it.
- What prompted this article is that I had lunch today with a VP of HR and we were discussing just how poorly so many candidates are at phone interviewing. She brought it up, not me. She asked me if I had the same bad experiences conducting phone interviews as she. Yes, I replied. Way too many candidates treat the phone interview the same way they treat the face-to-face interview. They are completely different and you have to adjust. This is so important that we actually offer this chapter from our job search workbook for free. Not because we have to offer it for free, but the phone interview is the most important interview. So many candidates just take it for granted. CLICK HERE if you want to download it.
- “I already know this stuff” syndrome. I get this all the time. You might even say this after reading the phone interviewing chapter. My answer to the comment, “I already know this stuff'” is “So what.” That isn’t important. We all know a lot of things, but we don’t do them and do them well. I know to keep my head still when I hit a golf ball. So what. I know it but doing it isn’t the same. I’m only 50% effective at doing it. I firmly believe this is one of the biggest reasons candidates aren’t as effective as they should be. They think they know it, but don’t do it and do it right.
- Working hard and putting in long hours isn’t the answer in a job search. A job search is an endurance race. It is very much like running a marathon so candidates must be efficient or like a marathon you will burn out. I find many candidates are just running in place and get burned out quickly.
The sad part is that there are so many tools and resources available to candidates. Never before in my 30 years have I seen so much excellent information readily available. Experts blogging, articles in newspapers, YouTube videos, and social media groups are all out there for candidates to tap into. Yet so few do, and even fewer actually implement the suggestions effectively.
I encourage all the candidates I represent to actively research. There are great tips and ideas out there and 90% are free. Spending an hour each night will dramatically impact your job search. Reading blogs on resumes, branding, social media, or watching some of the outstanding videos on YouTube can change the direction of your search very quickly.
Our contribution to you are our many free tools and resources. For example our audio library (CLICK HERE) has over 50 great audio recordings from our weekly radio show, the free chapter on phone interviewing (CLICK HERE) and our free LinkedIn Profile assessment (CLICK HERE) are just a few of the tools we offer.
Don’t forget to join our LinkedIn Job Search Networking Group for many more free resources. CLICK HERE to join.
I welcome your comments and thoughts.
Brad Remillard
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Comments (0)
As many of our loyal readers know – I’m not shy about vocalizing (can you do that on a blog?) my thoughts related to job search.
In fact, I’m probably one of the more (along with my partner Brad Remillard) controversial figures in job search blogging. Brad and I give “straight talk” (better known as ‘”tough love” by the girls on my high school basketball team) about why most job seekers conduct ineffective job hunts and why it takes so darn long to find a job.
We’re also two of the most prolific publishers of FREE and inexpensive job search content on the Internet. If you can’t find the answer to your job search question in our extensive library and archives, then it probably doesn’t exist.
We can make this bold statement since we’ve got the credentials to back it up through real experience of over 250,000 candidate interviews, over 1,000 search assignments, training over 5,000 recruiters, and 30,000 hiring executives and managers over the last 30 years.
Now to the real purpose of this blog post – why have I just generated a firestorm of controversy surrounding one of our most recent blog posts?
I put forth the idea in my last blog post that most candidates are NOT effectively using all the FREE job search tools that LinkedIn provides – and as a result – their job search is ineffective and taking far too long.
It’s not the only reason your job search is ineffective (there are hundreds of reasons), but it is a significant reason.
Oh my! You’d think I had just refuted a major law of universal physics.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many candidates weigh in with their opinions.
We can divide the opinions by those writing comments into two main camps:
Group 1: You’re right – I’m ineffective and need to get my act together to learn how to more use LinkedIn to improve my job search
Group 2: I already know everything there is to know in how to use LinkedIn and it’s useless. Being on LinkedIn has not helped my job search and I cannot see any value spending more time on LinkedIn.
To the first group, I applaud you for trying to learn everything you can that might help you in your job search. There are literally hundreds – perhaps even thousands of things you can be doing in your job search to make it more effective.
In coaching high school basketball, we have a saying “It’s the little things that make a difference”. Success doesn’t come from huge or amazing changes, it comes from all the little things someone does that their peers are not willing to do, such as diving on the floor for loose balls, boxing out, saving a ball from going out of bounds, sprinting back on defense (interesting parallel to job search).
Al Pacino, in his role as the Coach in “Any Given Sunday” talks about the success that comes from doing the little things in his locker room talk about “inches’. Again, interesting parallel – metaphor – for job search. The Coach talks about the “inches” (read: opportunities) that are all around us – yet most never reach for the extra inch. The inference is that unless you reach for the extra inch – success becomes elusive.
To the second group, I would say shame on you for thinking you’ve cornered the market on how to leverage LinkedIn. There is such a wealth of knowledge to be gained from reading books on LinkedIn, testing different ideas, experimenting with the tools, checking out how others do it, reading the blogs dedicated to LinkedIn, or taking one of the myriad of courses/classes/webinars on leveraging LinkedIn.
Can someone answer this question:
Why do most candidates not take advantage of the wealth of information, tools, resources, and techniques to improve their job search?
Is the reason most candidates don’t know what information, tools, resources, and techniques are available?
Or maybe the reason is that most candidates just don’t want to grab those extra “inches” that are everywhere around us.
Here are two examples from our own library/archive and resources:
How many of our readers have downloaded our FREE LinkedIn Profile Self-Assessment Tool to improve their chances of being picked by a recruiter or HR manager?
How many of our readers signed up for the webinar my partner, Brad Remillard, just taught on how to use SEO techniques on your LinkedIn Profile to improve where you appear in a search of candidates by hiring managers, recruiters, and HR professionals?
Why do you think most candidates do not take advantage of the myriad of resources available to help improve their job search?
Barry
