Jobs

The Job Hunter

/ Beth Younker / Leave a comment

I was in a position this year that I never expected – to be hunting for a new job less than 6 months after starting the previous one, and this painful process has provided some insights that I think are worth sharing.  Finding a new job isn’t like it used to be. It can take MANY rounds of interviews and lots of time, and it’s frustrating. Please note, this is a longer post than usual.

  1. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect. Even if you don’t get along with your manager, or find the job isn’t what you thought it was, disrespect just has no place in a professional setting. Whether you’re experiencing it from your leader or your coworkers, then that isn’t the place for you.  A company without a good moral compass will demonstrate from the top down that it’s toxic, and disrespect is just one sign of toxicity. No job, regardless of pay or benefits, is worth putting up with toxicity.
  2. Job hunting is hard. It will exhaust you, burn you out, make you cry, throw things, scream at the world, feel like you have nothing to offer and make you want to curl up under a blanket. Be ready for it, and know it’s not you.
  3. Plan ahead. Save up as much money as you can and be ready to make a move. Try to avoid quitting your job before you have another because you don’t know how long you’ll be out of work. In 2017 the team I was on was let go as part of a company reorganizational effort. It took me 182 applications and 20 months to find a job. This time around I applied for 109 in just over 2 months before I found a new position. 
  4. Make sure your resume looks really good. If you haven’t had it professionally done, consider doing so, or look for examples on the internet. You will find it helpful to have a section with skills – mine is right at the top, above experiences. I have a short professional summary followed by 9 bullets with skill keywords. Those get customized for each application to make sure AI picks out those keywords. Try to limit your experience to about 10 years, and keep the resume to 2 pages if possible. I’ve also tried to have a short description about each job, followed by one or two accomplishments in the role. 
  5. Use your eyes. Are you baffled by why you aren’t getting responses to your applications, despite customizing your resume and writing cover letters?  Occam’s Razor might be the answer. I ran my cover letters through spell check in Word every time and found nothing. What I failed to do was to use my own abilities to proofread, and suddenly one day my spell and grammar check started acting up, converting itself into French and telling me the cover letter had 0 words and characters. I downloaded a free grammar program, and was horrified at the mistakes that I had let go through. Recruiters are inundated with hundreds of applications for each job. You won’t make it past the initial AI screening if you have mistakes.
  6. Update your profile on LinkedIn. Reach out to every contact that you have that might be able to help with a referral. In today’s job market, networking is king. You still need a current resume and must submit applications, but you shouldn’t overlook the value of networking. You never know when a job will be posted and someone will think of you and say to themselves, “I know JUST the person for this”. The position that I accepted happened because of networking.
  7. How many applicants are there? Look at the number of applicants for a job, which is a LinkedIn feature. If there are more than 25 or so, your chances of getting reviewed by the recruiter are lower than if you’re in the top 10 or so. If there are more than 100, it may not be worth applying for the job although there seem to be mixed opinions on this.
  8. Is it REALLY remote? As you look through listings, you’re going to find that “remote” doesn’t always really mean remote. Some jobs will say remote but you must live in a particular city or state. You’ll have to read carefully through listings to see if you truly can live anywhere in the US for that job. I wish that recruiters and companies like Workday or Taleo who have application programs would develop different classification options of remote such as “Fully Remote” and “Limited Remote” to make it easier to search. 
  9. Follow someone like Liz Ryan on LinkedIn. Liz is a career coach and has some wonderful words of advice. Lessons I’ve learned from her include things like recognizing red flags in the application and interview process, when to move on, and how to realize your own value.
  10. Be ready to negotiate. I’ve learned that while a job posting may have a salary range listed, that doesn’t mean there isn’t wiggle room on it. If you’re interested and want the job, apply for it. You can always make a case for why you are worth more, but if you’re going to do that, be prepared with data and facts to support it. What are you able to bring to justify a higher salary? And if they can’t go higher, then ask for either a hiring bonus or perhaps some additional vacation time. What’s the worst that can happen? They can’t meet your requests and then you have to decide if you want the job or not.
  11. Why are you leaving? This is a question you’ll probably be asked especially if you’ve been there a short time. Be ready with talking points and be careful what you say. It may not be well received to run down another company, so choose your words wisely but don’t lie either. 
  12. Research the company you are considering. Glassdoor.com is a good site for that information. For example, had I done so I would have seen a company I went to was rated 2.8 out of 5 stars and had a lot of negative reviews.  I’d like to think that I would have not gone there had I remembered to do this research.
  13. Prepare to be ghosted. You’re not going to hear back from a lot of your applications. There are 5 that I applied to in mid-April, and still hadn’t heard a peep from those companies as of September 3. I assume by now they have either hired someone or have put the jobs on hold but it would have been nice to at least know I’m not being considered.
  14. Always write a “thank you” note to the recruiter and to anyone that interviews you. If you don’t have email addresses for the interviewers, you can always send a thank you in a Word document to the recruiter and ask them to forward it for you. You need to positively stand out in the interviewer’s mind, and a note is a good way to do that.
  15. Be ready to be rejected. I have been, many, many times. I try to not take it personally but it is really difficult not to, especially if you’re desperately unhappy in your job and need to get out, or when you learn you were the top candidate but they selected someone else with just “that much more” experience or who is internal.
  16. Have confidants and let them help lift you up. I’ve found support in so many places, and am grateful for it. I leaned on family and friends and they kept me sane. I knew I’d get through this, but I also must admit there were days when it felt like I wouldn’t, and couldn’t manage another day in that horrid job. Somehow, I did, and you will too.

 

Finally, not specific to job hunting but in general if you’re still in the early stages of your career, the best advice I can offer is to invest wisely now, so you’ll be ready to retire when you want to. As I have gotten closer to the end of my career, I find I have less patience for nonsense and wish I had socked away a lot more so I could just retire and walk away. Until I actually can I’ll give my best to my new (and hopefully last!) employer. 

I hope a few folks see this and find it helpful.

 

Past Behavior Interviews Without Skills Analysis is a Predictor for Disaster

/ Beth Younker / Leave a comment

I read an article recently by Henry Claypool, policy director for the Community Living Policy Center at Brandeis University in which he discussed the risks and challenges of using Artificial Intelligence and automation to screen candidates for employment. He talked about how using these can be a recipe for discrimination with respect to people with disabilities, and described how companies are using tools and techniques such as resume screeners, which review candidates’ CVs for desired keywords, e.g. leadership on a sports team; sentiment analysis tools, which purport to analyze candidates’ movements during video interviews; and game-based tests, in which a candidate’s performance during an online game is compared to the performance of existing employees at the company ( NBC News Think Job Hiring.)

The practices he discusses have been going on for at least 15 years now. I can remember being told as a new manager in the early 2000’s that “past performance is the best predictor of future behavior” by the HR representative teaching a group of us about how to interview prospective candidates with the new tool that was developed. No more questions geared toward “what are your skills in A, B and C” but instead, they were proscriptive in defined categories, asking things like “tell me about a time when you were in a difficult situation. What did you do and what was the outcome?” Or perhaps “tell me about a time when you were faced with an ethical dilemma at work. What did you do? Were there repercussions?” Furthermore, we were no longer allowed to ask questions off the cuff, but were to limit them to either the list of prepared questions from HR, or at most, we could deviate by saying “tell me more about that”. But coming up with our own? No way.

I’m not saying answers to those questions aren’t important; they may be, and depending on the role they might even be critical. However, I’ve also seen an increasing and disturbing trend happening as well. By not asking what skills workers possess, and how proficient they are in those skills, we see a whole crop of nice people hired with soft skills that are somewhere between good to excellent, who show up for work and try their best but then stumble with hard skills and we scratch our heads puzzlement as to why.

I’ve worked in a call center where staff needed to have those soft skills, certainly but they also needed to know how to work on computers and to do so efficiently, effectively, and to be able to troubleshoot issues that come up. They needed to know how to navigate the internet, use a SharePoint, and multitask efficiently. Managers for these people needed to be able to look at excel spreadsheets to evaluate the data on their employees, understand trends and metrics and know how to make decisions accordingly. They needed to be skilled enough in technology to help their staff troubleshoot when something isn’t working correctly and decide when it’s time to call the help desk. I would guess it’s the same everywhere: if the only questions asked during interviews are around things like “tell me about a time when you felt like you were treated unfairly. What did you do?” it’s little wonder that staff and managers both struggle in their respective roles. I really don’t know why anyone is surprised. We don’t ask if they know anything about technology, or know how to add formulas to a spreadsheet, but we get frustrated when they can’t do the work that is expected.

The statement that past performance IS a good predictor of future behavior assumes that none of us learn from the past, whether good experiences or mistakes. It also assumes that none of our behaviors change, and that simply isn’t true at all. I’m not the same person I was 5 or even 10 years ago. My experiences during that time have informed my thoughts and what my behavior will be now, asking me what I did THEN isn’t really relevant. Ask me what I CAN do, what skills I’ve learned or developed. Maybe I haven’t been a manager for a few years, but in that time, I may have found a mentor and met weekly with that person, taken classes and volunteered someplace in my community. Or, maybe I was really immature and impulsive a few years ago but something happened to me that forced me to take a hard look at myself and I grew up. Since that time, I’ve learned to take a different approach to things, perhaps becoming more measured and thoughtful in my decision making. All of those things will shape my thoughts and actions and I know that I would respond to a situation very differently now than I would have without them. If a hiring manager only looks at that past behavior as the predictor of future actions, what kind of picture will be painted?

Furthermore, once in a role, I’ve never once had a manager ask me “so how did you handle this before?” when we tried to work through something. They might say “what do you think you should do?” or “what are your recommendations for handling this?” but they never have revisited the past behaviors concept. So, does it even have any value in the ongoing day-to-day work place? In the moment you’re taking the things you’ve learned and applying them to that particular situation as you try to find an appropriate solution to a problem.

Mr. Claypool goes on to say in his article that “We need employers, technologists and disabled people to make sure the hiring and retention of employees don’t rely on flawed algorithms that inadvertently or intentionally result in disability discrimination. They can begin by designing hiring tools that only measure essential functions of particular jobs, taking into account the alternative ways that disabled people can carry out job-related tasks.” I would stipulate that starts with moving away from the current style of interviewing and reincorporate the skills component again, asking candidates “tell me about what you can do.” If HR experts think that behavioral based interviewing has to remain, then it needs to evolve, advancing into a second phase that incorporates questions like “and would you do the same thing now? If not, why not?” or “How would your response change today?” Only then can we hire the correctly qualified candidates into jobs.