Tag Archives: recruitment

Sure fire ways to fail job interviews

When you reached the interview stage your chances of landing a job are good. Employers rarely interview more than a handful of candidates. Most interviewers want you succeed; they need to fill a position and have other things to do.

Don’t blow the opportunity by making a basic mistake. While a good interview technique might not count for more than your skills and experience, a bad interview will  lose you a job that by rights you should have.

There are five ways you can fail a job interview:

1. Not preparing

As the cliché says:  prepare to succeed, don’t prepare to fail.

Know yourself. Know the skills, experience, attitudes, past performance, values you offer the employer.

Find out about the company, its products or services and who its customers are. Think about where you can play a part.

If possible, check what the company wants from employees. Try searching for news stories about the company and its activities. Read blogs written by people working for the company and what outsiders have to say about it.

2. Acting like you know everything

Interview preparation is a good idea, but don’t overdo the knowledge act. Everyone dislikes a person who behaves like they know everything. In knowledge-based industries no one person can know everything.

It is more important to show the ability to ask the questions so you can identify the issue or solution or steps to the solution. Knowing where to get the answers is at least as important as having the answers to hand.

3. Tell lies

Experienced interviewers quickly recognize which potential employees are full of hot air and which are the real McCoy.

One of the biggest mistakes is lying or over-selling your skills and ability. Try this and you’ll quickly come undone and ruin your reputation right across the industry. Assume employers talk to each other.

Outright lies are less commonplace than exaggeration or missing information. Whatever the temptation, avoid all types of untruth. Should things go wrong and you find yourself in a dispute things could get nasty – there have been cases employees being sued for misrepresentation.

4. Lack interest

Some jobs seem dull, but if you fail to show interest in the work on offer or the company doing the offering how can you expect them to show interest in you?

You may have to take on less exciting roles to reach the better one. The biggest mistake a knowledge worker can make in an interview is to come across as being too aloof, uninterested or not bothering to ask questions.

5. Betray previous employers

Prospective employers don’t want to hear tales about the awfulness of your previous workplaces, or worse, negative stories about people.

This sets off alarm bells. The smarter ones suspect that it might only be a matter of time before you badmouth them.

By the same token, you shouldn’t normally consider giving away insider knowledge or trade secrets of your previous employer. It doesn’t matter how justified you may feel, it doesn’t matter if your new employer is a direct competitor, never volunteer this kind of information. Doing so will see you labelled as a potential traitor.

Recruiters suspicious of functional resumes

Recruiter Brad Remillard on Functional resumes:

I don’t read them. It is obvious when one has a functional resume they are trying to hide something and I’m rarely going to take the time to attempt to figure it out. 1 second.

Remillard was writing in  How Recruiters Read Resumes In 10 Seconds or Less.

His suspicion of functional resumes is well-placed. Like good writing, a good resume or CV is crisp and unambiguous. Functional resumes appear deliberately ambiguous.

Recruiters read resumes in under 10 seconds

Recruiters are brutal when sifting through resumes and CVs. As Brad Remillard explains in  How Recruiters Read Resumes In 10 Seconds or Less it seems disrespectful, but from their point of view it makes sense.

He says his first pass over a pile of resumes is box-checking. He can quickly rules out many candidates in a matter of seconds. Here’s an example of how he works:

Industry. If my client is in banking and your background is primarily manufacturing – goodbye.  These two often are so different that the client isn’t open to considering such different industries. This works both ways, if you have a manufacturing background I’m not going to consider someone with banking. 2-3  seconds to determine this.

I’ve hired many journalists in my time and I usually take a similar approach – at least with the first cut. If I advertise a job and it asks for X,Y and Z, then I toss out all the applications which don’t have them.

And because I’m an editor, when I hire journalists I immediately cut applications or CVs with spelling or grammar mistakes. I’m unlikely to keep poorly written ones either.

Leave salary negotiations until after job offer

If you’ve been head-hunted or approached by a recruiter and find yourself in sight of a new job, do what you can to stall salary discussions until the employer decides it needs you.

That way, once you know you are the person they want, you have negotiating leverage.

There’s a good chance recruiters and interviewers will pressure you to name a your price before it gets to that stage. Politely decline and say you’ll be happy to discuss pay when you know more about the job.

When negotiation start, aim to get the employer to name their figure first. If the pay is what you expected or better – you are home and dry.

If the offer is not enough, just say “it is not enough” and let them come up with a better figure – though you’ll probably be asked “what is enough?”

Make sure you have an answer.

Head-hunted? Close the deal

You got the secretive phone call. You met the head-hunter in a discreet pub or café. You jumped through the hoops, passed the tests and sailed through the interviews.

Now there’s only one step before you make the jump: negotiating the right deal.

Because you’ve been head-hunted, the negotiation is slightly different from when you answer an advertisement or otherwise find your way to a new job.

People asked you to come and work for them. They paid an expensive head-hunter to find you, woo you and tempt you into taking their approach seriously.

Face it, they aren’t going to go to all that trouble and then lose your skills because of a few dollars here and there.

Negotiate a deal

If negotiating a deal is like a game of poker – and there are similarities – then you’ve been dealt a good hand. But as any card player will tell you, the cards you are holding are only part of the game. You still need to keep your wits about you.

Most people understandably reduce an employer’s entire offer to its cash equivalent when evaluating salary offers. This makes a lot of sense and I’m not going to disagree with the general principle.

It is worth paying close attention to working conditions.

For example, if you don’t like overseas travel – maybe you have a young family – make sure there’s written agreement on the amount of required overseas travel.

Likewise this is a good moment to make sure you have adequate support staff, the right working environment, a budget that covers your expected expenses and so on.

Hours and leave

This is the best time to talk about working hours and annual leave entitlement. Once you sign it is too late.

Employers talk vaguely about you technically being paid for a working week of so many hours, but being ready to work as many hours as it takes to complete the various tasks assigned to you. This is fine up to a point, but if your employer is effectively asking you to commit to unlimited hours, it is not unreasonable to put some qualifications. For example you might ask that you never have to work on Sunday because you’re an active member of your local church.

Annual leave is a sticky issue. You’re entitled to a certain amount of leave by law. In practice the amount of leave your employer will let you to take will probably be considerably less than your legal entitlement and will almost certainly be less than the amount nominated in your contract. These days most people get a handsome payout for unclaimed holiday pay when they leave a job. The money is nice, but time to unwind is better.

A long time ago I worked with someone who quickly climbed through the ranks of a sizable organisation. After each promotion he negotiated a deal increasing his annual leave – in many cases he traded leave entitlement for pay.

The result was he reached a level where he had 10 weeks leave a year. This might not be possible today, but the principal is good. For most of us cash-rich, time-poor knowledge workers annual leave is a luxury.

In my opinion it is a good idea to specify some leave dates when negotiating initial terms and conditions before joining a new company. Try and get them written into an agreement. If you’ve been head-hunted the employer will almost certainly agree to this as it seems a cheap way to complete a deal. Even if you haven’t been head-hunted, the salary negotiation is your best opportunity to fix this.

Get professional tax advice

It pays to get some professional advice about the salary part of any deal. The big trap people fall into when head-hunted, is to overlook the tax considerations of any extra salary. Unless you’ve been hired by an US company to work in the states, you will almost certainly already be on the highest rate of income tax.

This means that looks like a 20 percent pay rise on paper might be as little as a 10 percent increase in take home pay. In many cases it is possible to negotiate terms that minimise the tax impact.

Finally, there’s twist to negotiating salary when you are head-hunted. Being head-hunted is flattering. Don’t let your head be turned by it – you may laugh, but many head-hunted executives end up with poor deals by being charmed into accepting far less than their new employer would pay.

It doesn’t help that these processes tend to go ahead at a breakneck pace. The usual rule of salary negotiation is to do plenty of homework and benchmark your salary against industry norms – if the employer is in a hurry you may not have time to do this properly.

If possible try to slow the process down. Don’t make it look as if you are dragging your feet, but buy yourself some time to do the research. A few days shouldn’t make any difference to your new employer, but they can make a big difference to you.

Head-hunted? here’s what to do

You aren’t likely to get head-hunted unless you are already near the top of the career tree. In Australia, real head-hunters don’t tend to look for people to fill positions paying much less than $150k because there’s scant reward for the effort involved.

Some earn a commission, taking a percentage of the first year’s salary. Others get a fixed fee.

Either way head-hunters are expensive and can only be justified for senior appointments. Of course, the salary threshold will differ in other countries.

There are exceptions to the salary rule. Head-hunters are occasionally asked to deal with hard to-fill-vacancies in specialised niches. Occasionally an organisation hires a professional head-hunter to woo a specific person – possibly from a rival.

How head-hunters work

A head-hunter’s operating style makes a huge difference to the way you should deal with them. Fixed fee head-hunters receive a payment whether the candidates they find are hired or not. Typically these head-hunters are only interested in recruiting for the very top jobs.

Once they have a curriculum vitae they are unlikely to punt it around the industry if they fail to fill the original vacancy. While they may keep it on file and use it later if a similar position comes up later, they probably won’t do this without first getting permission.

It isn’t always true, but the head-hunters operating on a commission basis tend to work for a number of clients at the same time. Typically they’ll operate at a slightly lower level. They build databases of potential candidates: be warned once you are ‘in play’ they might hound you until they find you a new job.

Don’t assume that because head-hunters earn commission they have an interest in negotiating a high salary. In practice they can maximise their income by turning over more business than by squeezing an employer for a few thousand dollars here or there.

So, while they are happy to see you get more dollars, don’t push your luck in negotiations. If anything they are keener to close the deal than win more money.

Interview coaching

Some commission head-hunters will coach you before an interview. They’ll do whatever they can to help you secure the job. At times you may feel they are pushing you– that’s because they are pushing you.

It isn’t unusual for rival commission head-hunters – even from within the same recruitment organisation – to have candidates in line for a single job. While you’ll get a lot of push, you probably won’t get much of attention, that’s because they have so many irons in the fire.

Although it might look like you have a job in the bag, you might be only one of many candidates.

Fixed fee head-hunters will spend a lot of time with you. They probably won’t coach you, but they will help with negotiations and finding information.

You can expect to get lots of feedback about how the process is progressing. By the time you are in front of a company, you’ll be one of only two or three short-listed candidates – the job isn’t yours yet, but you will almost certainly be a good fit for the job, much of the remaining work is determining if you are the best fit for that employer.

Negotiating position

Another dangerous assumption is that a call from a head-hunter puts you in a strong negotiating position. After all, extracting better salary, terms and conditions is easier when someone else is doing the asking.

To some extent this is true, but don’t get carried away, head hunters spend their working lives recruiting people, you only change jobs once in a blue moon. You certainly have some negotiating leverage, but remember you’re up against professionals and they will have seen all this before. What’s more, their clients are the employers, not the candidates.

If they have done their homework properly the prospective employer will already have a very definite idea of your worth to their business. They are prepared to negotiate and may even go past their expected limits. You should remind yourself that they probably have other candidates in the pipeline too.

Despite this, a call from a head-hunter is an excellent way to boost your salary or job. After all, if they want to tempt you away from your current position, they are going to need to offer something attractive.