Job Hiring Process

When to Invest in a Professional in your Job Search

May 13, 2016 By Marta Goertzen

So much information is readily available on how to find a job – books, Internet, job seeker groups. Why in the world would anyone pay a professional for information available for free?

Actually, using professional services makes sense if your current job search approach is not working for you.

Here are some ways to know if a professional can be useful:

If you come in second in interviews. Your background and resume must be good enough to get you the interview but if you do not get the offer you might be doing something during the interview to undermine your background. It is hard to get feedback from the company. A professional can offer insight into what is going on during the interview.
If you have trouble getting interviews there could be something wrong with your resume or Linkedin profile.
If you seldom get invitations for connections on LinkedIn your profile might not include the right key words.
If you are still applying for positions through advertisements in the newspaper.
If you are a college student without work experience and not sure where to start your search.
If you have been in your current role for a number of years but don’t feel like you are getting anywhere it could be time to check out outside opportunities. Maybe it has been so long you are not sure how to start.
If you are coming back into the workforce after a while you might need some help.
If you are really busy it might be hard to do the research needed to get ready for an opportunity that falls into your lap. A professional can do the behind the scenes work to get you ready.
A professional can help with information and feedback that you cannot usually get any other way.

Have an initial discussion with several professionals. You want to pick an experienced professional you get along with who has an approach you think you will be effective for you. Check out references to be sure this person will be the right fit for you.

The right professional services can supplement information from books and the Internet. Consider the fee to be an investment in your future! The Interview Doctor might be just the professional to fit your needs!!

Get your copy of this month’s FREE Ebook “Effectively Utilizing LinkedIn In Your Job Search“. It will help you be strategic with your job hunting and teach you tips so that you will see better results!

Click here to request the eBook.

Put a mirror to your Corporate Culture – The Candidate Experience

May 6, 2016 By Marta Goertzen

It’s the little things that add up to a great candidate experience.

Early in her career Susan interviewed for a position as a chemist with a company that distributes supplies used in research laboratories. The interview went badly. The company representatives were not on time or prepared. They did not get back to her when they said they would and in fact were downright rude during the interviews and in the follow up. Susan was happy she did not get the job.

Susan went on to a very successful career in Research & Development person managing large labs in multiple locations.

For the rest of her career, some 30 years, she NEVER allowed anyone on her staff to order lab supplies from that company. She remembered that story like it was yesterday and repeated it often.

A candidate’s experience begins when they start researching the company. It continues through every interaction during the recruiting process. The interaction makes a lasting memory of the total experience, good or bad. It could influence their view of the company for years in the future. Just like Susan.

Perhaps you have had a similar experience in your life? Most people have.

Candidates invest a lot in a job search, preparing search materials, doing research, and preparing for interviews, not to mention time and money spent on travel and interviews. They resent it when they feel they are treated badly. They never forget and they tell others!

Given the candidate’s investment, don’t they deserve to be treated like good customers?

The cost of a poor customer experience adds up.

You lose good candidates now and in the future. They tell their friends, family and colleagues who won’t apply either and maybe won’t buy from you.

Employees stop referring their friends and maybe get disenchanted themselves. Disenchanted employees might leave or worse hang around with a bad attitude.

You will probably make more bad hires because the best candidates have more options.

All this word of mouth going on behind the scenes damages that corporate brand you work so hard to develop. It is like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Here are characteristics of a great candidate experience.

Respond promptly to everything – phone calls, emails, applications, requests, job offers. Simply responding to candidates will improve the candidate experience. It also separates you from your competition.
Be flexible to the candidates’ needs, not rigid. Offer flexible interview scheduling and you will get the candidate’s attention.
Be honest and pay attention to candidates’ needs.
No unpleasant surprises – do what you say you will do, don’t change the specifications all the time, don’t change the schedule, be there when you say you are going to be there and respond when you say you will respond.
Solicit feedback from candidates and apply what you learn.
Keep candidates updated and explain what is going on. Tell people if there will be a delay. Ignoring candidates or stringing them out for your own convenience is particularly annoying.
Add an unexpected “wow” factor to seal the deal. How about a little muffin basket to welcome the new hire?

Time to get out that mirror and figure out what your candidates think about you then make adjustments.

Make every touch point a great experience. It is the little things that add up to a great candidate experience.

Informational sources:

Improving the Candidate Experience

2015 Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Research Report

To view this video, or to view other videos featuring other strategic job search tips and tools from The Interview Doctor click here.

Jargon Soup: The difference between Recruitment and Talent Acquisition

April 19, 2016 By Marta Goertzen

Is talent acquisition just another way of saying recruitment or is this just another jargon fad or is it something we should pay attention to?

I did a little research. According to some important human resource thought leaders, the difference between the two terms is strategic.

Bringing new talent into your organization is risky. So much can go wrong if you hire the wrong person.

Recruiting is the term we have used for years meaning to send out signals into the marketing place and bring a new person into your company to fulfill some important role. Recruitment is an action, a tactic. It is a process. It usually involves the activities of sourcing, screening, interviewing, selecting and hiring.

But the concept of bringing new talent into your organization should be more than a tactic. People are one of the costliest expenses. Adding new people changes your culture and allows you to reach a wider market. When the new person adds value, your organization is stronger. But when it doesn’t, wow you can have a problem. We should consider the concept of bringing new talent into your organization as a strategic initiative.

Talent acquisition includes the tactic of recruiting but also some strategic elements that help your business grow, such as:

Talent planning and strategy to ensure your talent is aligned with your strategic business plan
Employment branding: These are activities that help define your company image, culture and reputation in the marketplace. Think of it as marketing for the people side of the business. With social media, employment branding often becomes a candidate’s first impression.
Candidate audiences: Part of your talent strategy is to define and understand your target audience, the talent pool from which you source candidates. You might adjust your branding and sourcing outreach to a particular audience. But you have to know who you are talking to first.
Candidate relationship management includes the steps you take to offer a positive candidate experience and build relationships with people and audiences who might be candidates someday in the future.
Metrics and Analysis. You get what you measure, right, so talent acquisition concepts include some way of knowing if you are making progress to drive better recruitment decisions and improve the quality of hire.

These core elements have tactics and activities just like recruitment. Recruitment might be the element of talent acquisition you are most familiar with but talent acquisition is the strategic initiative that makes your business grow.

CEOs worry about talent. Talent acquisition and development routinely rates as the top 1 or 2 things CEOs worry about. They build business plans around having the right talent in the right place at the right time to accomplish business goals!

This is particularly critical in small to medium sized businesses leveraging fewer employees to accomplish your goals. Every team member has a critical role. A bad hire is an even bigger problem than in a larger business where one or two bad apples might be able to hide in the bureaucracy.

Make the most of your people assets by going beyond recruitment to think strategically about talent in support of your strategic business plans.

To view this video, or to view other videos featuring other strategic job search tips and tools from The Interview Doctor click here.

Filling Jobs: The Hiring Manager’s Point of View

April 15, 2016 By Marta Goertzen

Let us consider an open position from the hiring managers’ point of view. There are likely two main reasons a position is open:

Someone on the team left the job through termination, promotion, or resignation.
Work is so plentiful that a new person has been approved to be added to the team.

In both situations, there is more work to be done than people to do the work. Someone, likely the hiring manager, must absorb the extra work. This creates a problem for the hiring manager.

Hiring takes a lot of time. You have to find candidates, shuffle through resumes and phone screen, pick a few people to interview, and find people to help you interview, schedule the interview, and then hope you pick the right candidate

All the while you are working on short term priorities just to keep up. Sometimes it feels like bailing a sinking boat. Short term priorities at the expense of long term results.

When you are standing on the sidelines it seems obvious that the hiring manager should focus on the job search. I want to shout, “Please participate in your own rescue and prioritize the recruiting process.”

But it is hard to let go of the extra work long enough to prioritize the hiring process.

Then there is paperwork. You have to make sure you have the right forms filled out, check references, and put together an offer. You have to get the proper approval at the beginning, middle, and end of the process.

Even when the right candidate is found for the right position that needs to be filled, sometimes it takes time to order the right tools and make sure the work area is set up to accommodate the new hire.

This is a lot of hassle. All the while the work piles up, everyone in the department, including the hiring manager, is overloaded trying to achieve the department goals while shorthanded.

Even if everything goes smoothly according to plan, the hiring manager often wonders if the candidate represents the correct choice. Will this person fit into the team? Will the person perform as advertised? Are we making a mistake by hiring this person?

Feel sorry for the poor hiring manager. The only way a hiring manager gets any resolution to this problem is to find a replacement for the person who left or fill the open position to handle the extra work.

Hiring is an awful experience. No one is happy. The short-handed team is overwhelmed and the candidates think they are being ignored.

What can you do about this situation?

• Hiring managers: Prioritize the hiring process. It is the only way out. Do it quickly and thoroughly so you hire the right person to complete the critical success factors that will make you look good.
• Candidates: Be prepared. Make sure your marketing materials (resume, LinkedIn pages, and whatever you plan to say while networking and interviewing) demonstrate that you can be successful in this job. That way you stand out and hiring managers will notice you.

Let me know if we can help! The Interview Doctor can help companies and candidates make a better match!

Walking a Tight Rope: How to handle extended Job Interview Process

March 11, 2016 By Marta Goertzen

Imagine yourself on a tightrope stretched across the Grand Canyon. Your feet wobble a bit. Your breath catches if you glance down.

Job search is like that. One false move and POOF you hired the wrong person. Or POOF you said the wrong thing and you didn’t get the job. What a tough spot for either party!

A client, we will call him John, had been President of a medium sized company until he was suddenly a job seeker. He had hired plenty of people in his day. Now he was on the other side of the desk. Through networking he found an opportunity as a CFO in a larger company, a job that sounded perfect. Now the tightrope adventure begins!

Interviews went great. John established his credentials then rapport with the boss and the team. The equity partners loved him. Lots of psychological testing and structured interviews.

Final stage: a full day with an industrial psychologist, the HR leader and a representative from the equity partners.

Here is the tightrope.

Hiring mistakes are costly especially at the senior level so we understand the need for extra caution before bringing a key player on board. Yet this extra caution makes for a complicated candidate experience. It could scare away candidates. It is not a question of intimidation but hassle. How much hassle will candidates tolerate before the best candidates back out? The tightrope.

We needed a strategy to handle this tightrope, to respond to the barrage of psychological tests (at least 5 hours’ worth) then the full day psychological interview. We role played a little, talked through the possibilities and polished some stories for behavioral interview questions.

Finally we decided we couldn’t completely anticipate the day so we settled on this advice:

Be honest. If you are the right person then they will hire you. If not, no amount of faking it or guessing during psychological testing will make a difference.
Stay calm. Take a breath. That is what the best tightrope walkers do!
Be the best version of yourself. Everyone is clearly watching your every move. Be nice to the receptionist and the gardener. Don’t pick your nose or put your feet on the desk (real things candidates have done, honest!)
Be prepared. Take the pre-tests available online. Just Google the name of the assessment and you will find loads of consulting firms offering free, no obligation pre-tests. This way you will be aware of what the company will see. Not that it changes anything but preparation helps with confidence.
Get a good night sleep. You should be rested and clear headed prior to the intensity of a full day psychological interview.

John called me that evening on the way home from the full day session. He was exhausted but exhilarated. When he arrived they presented him with a case study. He had one hour to understand a complicated scenario and create a 30 minute PowerPoint presentation explaining potential solutions. One hour was not enough time.

The presentation triggered a two hour discussion about business options revealing how John approaches business problems, involves other people and utilizes business data. Afterwards they told John that he got further in the case study than most people, probably a nod to his previous financial experience and his overall experience running a business in his last position.

The afternoon was spent in a series of behavioral interviews. “Tell me about a time when…” and “We have this scenario. What would you do?” Our prior preparation helped here because John had stories ready. He felt most comfortable with this section.

Bottom line: John got the job! He walked carefully across the tightrope by being himself, being prepared and staying calm. I’d like to think I helped… maybe a little! He also brings to his new job a better appreciation for the candidate experience. Maybe he can help someone else walk the tightrope in the future!