Unemployed in Des Moines

Perry Newman, CPC CSMS is a nationally recognized executive resume writer, career coach, AIPC certified recruiter and SMMU certified social media strategist known for his ability to help his clients get results. You can view his sample resumes at http://www.perrynewman.com/, and email him your resume at perry@perrynewman.com for FREE resume critique.

“An actor never plays a speech. He always plays a scene, an event, a situation, an occurrence. Words are part of the occurrence.” Lee Strasberg

So what does this have to do with you? Your a CEO, an accountant, a programmer, a sales rep, an educator, a medical biller, or a recent college graduate; not a thespian.

Think again; if you’re interviewing for a job the first 2-5 minutes are critical in getting your message across and doing it convincingly. So to get a job offer in today’s competitive job market 90% of you will need a great script, lots of rehearsal time and the proper wardrobe.

How to prepare and conduct a winning interview!

Your interview begins the moment it is scheduled; from this moment on you begin researching the company, honing your image, and anticipating questions you’ll be asked, and rehearsing your responses to them. You’ll also prepare the questions you want to ask the interviewer and ways you can take equal control of the interview.

The most important key to success for any interview…

A fellow coach once told me that she had a client who spent so much time trying to craft perfect answers to each question that her body language was completely off. She was so nervous that she wasn’t connecting with any of the people she was interviewing with.

The key to being a great interviewee is you’ve got to give yourself time to relax. This means you must plan on arriving for your interview 10-20 minutes early. When you get to an interview late or in the nick of time you’re going to look and feel rushed. That is the last impression you want to leave a potential employer with.

Preparing for an interview is not as hard as some of you may think.

You may not know the exact questions you will be asked, but you can count on the questions focusing on two things; whether you have the experience, skills and knowledge to do the job, and whether you fit the perceived profile of the person this company is going to hire.

Taking this into account, here are some ways to develop a winning interview strategy.

1. Compile a thorough inventory of your talents, experience, business, technical and interpersonal skills, and your overall subject knowledge.
2. Review the job posting and develop a profile of the company’s ideal candidate.
3. Check off the skills you possess that appear in the company profile your prepared and rate yourself on each one on a scale of 1-10
4. Now comes the hard part. Prepare a 90 second pitch that describes the new you based solely on the desired profile.
5. Prepare additional 90 second pitches describing accomplishments you have achieved that relate to specific factors, experience, skills and challenges that appear in the job post.

Bonus Tips

1. Dress to blend in, not to impress. Do your homework to find out how others in the company dress and then dress accordingly. The two factors to know are how casual or conservative will be a turn on or a turn off. Research the culture and mirror it. It is not what’s in your closet that will impress people; it’s how well you fit in.

2. When in doubt smile. A smile brightens up a room and is infectious. If the interviewer is having a bad day a smile will turn it around. If he or she is having a great day, it will continue that feeling. Nobody wants to be around a sourpuss and even fewer people want to hire or work with one. Interviewers are looking for a connection, and you make that connection by smiling.

3. Remember, the interviewer is a human being as well. You’re not the only person in a room with someone they haven’t met. The interviewer is there to find out more about you so be polite, friendly and considerate.

4. Mirror your interviewer’s tone. Having the ability to empathize with others will serve you well in the interview and in life at the office. Pay attention to your interviewer’s body language and tone and do your best to match it. If they’re upbeat, you’re upbeat. If they’re not, rein your excitement in a little bit so that you don’t unnerve them.

Harry Urschel has over 20 years experience as a technology recruiter in Minnesota. He currently operates as e-Executives, writes a blog for Job Seekers called The Wise Job Search, and can be found on Twitter as @eExecutives.

Every now and then, I have a job seeker tell me…

“I really wasn’t that interested in that job, and so I didn’t do my best in the interview.”

I always think… what a wasted opportunity!

People often close off the possibility of a hiring process moving further because they decided in a moment that this wasn’t a job they wanted. Perhaps they didn’t like the role, the company, the hiring manager, or some other aspect of it. They get dispassionate, or overly succinct in their answers. They show no further interest in the role at all. The employer judges the response and closes things off.
People forget some basic principles in the process…

You are never obligated to accept an offer! Continuing the process with enthusiasm and commitment can have tremendous benefits for you, as we’ll discuss further shortly. Should you be successful and ultimately get an offer, you are certainly not under any legal, moral, or ethical obligation to accept the position. Why not go for an offer with every opportunity you can?

You can always use more practice! For most job seekers, you don’t get that many opportunities to practice and hone your interview skills under “live fire”. It’s critically important to prepare and practice for interviews prior to meeting the employer. However, it still feels different when you’re actually there, getting asked the questions when it counts. Go through each interview process as far as you can, the best way you can, to help you refine your skills for the interviews your really do want.

Every impression counts! It really is a small world. It amazes me how many times prior contacts come back around and reconnect weeks, months, or years later. We also live in a time when people move to new jobs regularly. Any impression you create with someone today, may help or hurt you when you might encounter them again someday. A hiring manager at a company you are interviewing for today for a job you don’t want, may be a hiring manager, or potential networking contact at another company months or years from now for a job you do want. It happens all the time, and the impression you left with them the first time will impact their interest in you the next time as well. Make every impression your best.

Other opportunities can result from the process! Similarly, you never know what other opportunities may come out of a good interview process if you stick with it. It’s not unusual for someone to go through an entire hiring process for a position, and find out at the offer stage that the company decided that the candidate actually fits another role better. They make an offer for an entirely different position that may be an ideal fit for that person. If you didn’t do your best throughout the process, or “exited” too early, that prospect can never happen.

It’s great to get a boost of affirmation! As I often say… One of the most important, and most difficult things to do in a job search, is to maintain a positive mental attitude! As time goes on, there are plenty of things to get discouraged about. Finding ways to boost your attitude and feel good about charging forward is key to a successful outcome. Even if you decide not to accept a particular offer, it sure feels good to receive one! It proves you’re employable, and an attractive candidate to some employer. That affirmation can provide a great bump to your confidence as you continue your search!

Don’t ever present less than your very best in any interview process. Regardless of how you feel about a particular position, always follow through to its conclusion. The benefits can be tremendous!

From the SimplyHired Blog…

The Situation: You’re in an interview that is going really well. But then the interviewer asks you what your salary requirements are. *cue ominous music* Give an answer that is too high and the employer may rule you out as a potential candidate. Give them too low of a number and you risk not getting enough compensation.

To be prepared for this question, you should research what typical salaries are for positions similar to the one to which you are applying. By using SimplyHired.com’s Salaries tool, you can find out what the average salary is for jobs in our database that match your keywords. *Some statistical approximations are used.

For example, say you are applying to nursing jobs in San Francisco, CA. With this tool, you will see that the average nursing salaries are about $65,000. You can search for salaries based on specific keywords, such as skills or job title. So say you are looking for social media jobs. According to our Salaries tool, the average salary for all jobs with “social media” anywhere in the listing is $93,000 (changing careers, anyone?).

Have a blog or website? You can take these salary graphs “to-go” in the Grab This Graph box to the right of the graph. Just copy and paste the HTML into your web page to add it to your site. You’ll be sharing it with the world in a few seconds.

Our salary tool is a great way to research appropriate salary ranges when faced that question in an interview, as well as a great way to research salaries in other industries if you’re looking to change careers. Find out your worth!

Judi Perkins, the How-To Career Coach, was a recruiter for 22 years, consulting with hundreds of hiring authorities throughout the hiring process. She’s seen over 500,000 resumes, knows how hiring authorities think and how they hire. As a result she understands and teaches what other coaches don’t: why the typical strategies in finding a job so often fail, what to do instead, and why.

Last week, we looked at the concept of giving away power in the interviewing process, why and how that happens, and a few ways to retain it instead, If you haven’t read it, check out How You Give Away Power – Part 1. Now let’s look at additional reasons and ways to counter them.

When you haven’t identified what you want in your next job, what you want is….a job. Each interview becomes a hurdle you feel you need to clear. Rejections become a reason to double your effort to win over every hiring authority. Combined, both of them result in your giving away more power, not less.

Candidates unconsciously fear that they’ll be judged and found wanting. It automatically puts them on the defensive, eager to please. From innocuous things such as getting a tickle in your throat to being fired, they often fear these situations will be seen as egregious faults worthy of not making the cut. As if interviewers don’t sneeze without tissues? Or get laid off? Or worse?

Getting fired without cause is no reason to lose sleep over how to handle it. When you worry so much about its effect on your interview that you over explain, it actually costs you the job. As Shakespeare said, “Methinks you doth protest too much.” Rather than clearing the air, you’re suffusing it with increased doubt.

Instead of creating a concern for the interviewer, find a way to turn the anticipated concern into a positive and then introduce it into the conversation. When you understand how to do this in a manner that impacts the company, rather than you, then you’ve planted a positive thought before any negative has time to develop.

When you don’t know what you want – except the job – you try too hard. It comes through in your tone of voice, your body language, and your choice of words, however subtle that may be. The interviewer may not consciously pick it up, but he’ll react to it nonetheless. Interviewers are inclined to ferret out problems, go with preconceptions and stick with cookie cutter patterns under the impression that will result in a better hiring decision. Sometimes they’re actually looking for ways to eliminate you, whether you, and they, know it or not. Why help them find a problem? In fact, why give it to them on a silver platter?

If you don’t have a degree and that’s a “concern,” your answer should be, “I understand why you feel that’s important. Some of my employers have initially felt that way too. But as you can see from my resume, I’ve been very successful in this field and in my roles, and the lack of degree hasn’t impeded my ability to impact my employer positively.”

Notice you didn’t argue, nor did you deflate with despair, causing the interview to spiral further downward and cementing every negative you feared might take place. Instead, you’ve supported his opinion, acknowledged that it’s not the first time you’ve encountered it, and shown him – with an objective piece of paper – that it hasn’t made any difference in your performance, and you’ve brought it back to benefiting his company.

He’s challenging you to tell him why he should hire you when you lack what he wants. And you need to tell him, subtly, why his view is inaccurate and, at the same time, present him with the solution. In this example, it’s that equating a degree with success is a fallacy.

Know what you want. Present yourself in a positive manner that provides a solution rather than succumbing to their attempts to keep things cookie cutter safe. Learn how to read the signals and understand what’s going on below the surface, so that you hear what is really being said. And know how to ask questions to find out if it’s a company worth pursuing. Interviewing involves selling. It also involves gathering information. And it has to be done concurrently. That’s the way you keep your power.