Dust off the phone and make a call!

These days, it isn’t hard to keep in touch with people who can positively influence your career. Other than the obvious options like phone and email, there are other methods to keep in touch with people like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and I’m finding that increasingly, recruiters and hiring managers (even bosses!) are willing to link up so that you can see what they’re up to.

How often you should keep in touch with someone who might be able to help you with your career is another question…the method of communication is another question.

When it comes to job searching, people often wonder what they should do following an interview in terms of when and how frequently they should contact the interviewer just to see what is going on. As the days turn into a week and you haven’t heard from a person you interviewed with, you probably tend to start thinking that you didn’t get the job and in some cases that might actually be the case. In other cases though, perhaps the interviewer was just busy or traveling or otherwise indisposed and couldn’t get in touch with you to let you know about the status of your job candidacy with them.

I recently had a job searcher asking me that question – how often should I follow up after an interview – and she also wondered how she should do it i.e. phone or email.

One thing you can always ask before leaving the interview is to get an idea from the interviewer what happens next and when. Will there be another interview for candidates they’re interested in or will they go straight to an offer? What is the timing for this decision.

Knowing these answers can help you save the aggravation of wondering why you haven’t heard anything if you already know in advance that the hiring manager will be out of the country for two weeks or if they don’t plan to make a hiring decision for 4 weeks, etc.

I’ve read that in sales, one of the reasons why sales people often don’t make the sale is that they simply don’t follow up. They contact a potential customer, do their presentation, maybe leave them with some information and then either don’t follow up or perhaps only follow up once and then don’t follow up again.

People make decisions and process information differently so our decision-making process might not be one that responds well to a sales person who either doesn’t follow up or who doesn’t follow up enough.

Relating This To A Job Search

I’ve experienced all sorts of situations myself in sales related to how often I followed up with a customer/prospect and quite enough you can tie it into a job search and your dealings with hiring managers and interviewers.

Let’s look at the scenarios for how frequently you follow up with someone.

You don’t follow up enough: I can think of cases where I didn’t follow up with someone enough (or at the right time) and then later found out this person ended up buying from someone else. As a sales person, this situation really sucks. You could have had the sale but didn’t contact the customer enough or at the right time. The same goes for job searching. People hire when they need to hire. Timing is everything they say…and it’s true. Always find out the timing of when a hiring manager plans to hire.

You followed up too much: I generally don’t scare customers away but I did do this at least once. I was under a deadline to get a customer re-signed because there was a time frame and if the customer missed it, they missed it for the year. I got the impression the customer was planning on buying again (they were already a customer) and they were always asking me to call next week, call in two weeks, call next Tuesday, etc but I guess I followed up with them once too often because they finally told me to stop calling and told me they were no longer planning on renewing with my company. In hindsight I think the customer was simply looking for a way out and I guess I gave it to him but I was getting tired of feeling like I was chasing this customer and wasting my time. So while you don’t want to scare a customer (i.e. a hiring manager in a job search) away, you don’t want to get the run around either. At some point a decision needs to be made and you need to find out if you’re being considered for the job or not. No one wants to waste their time or get their hopes up for no reason.

You don’t follow up at all: As mentioned above, sales are often lost because sales people simply don’t follow up at all. So are jobs. In a job search sense, you can choose not to follow up with a hiring manager – and in many cases that’s how they prefer it because they don’t want to be bombarded with job searchers checking in – but the truth is that most job searchers don’t follow up at all. If you’re working directly with a hiring manager, you want to know not only the timing of the hire but if you’re allowed to follow up with the hiring authority and what method you should use. You don’t want to scare away the decision-maker – see my example above – but you also want to know where you stand. If you’re working with a recruiter, they should be handling this part of the process for you and should know about the timing of the hire and where you stand with regards to getting an offer.

How often do you follow up with people who can positively affect your job searches?

Mirroring body language is something I find myself doing on phone calls and when dealing with people in a business setting. Mirroring refers to how you adjust your body language, language, expressions, movements, etc based on what the person you’re dealing with is doing.

Sometimes you’ll deal with someone who is very soft spoken for example and if you’re loud, you might literally scare the quiet person off or at least leave them with a bad impression, that you’re too loud in this case. If you adjust your voice level to match theirs (ie. mirror them by speaking softer) you might find you’re able to build some rapport with them based on the fact that you’re speaking in a similar manner to them. We’re not talking about actually mimicking their voice, just the loudness of their voice in this case.

I find myself doing this on the phone when someone answers the phone and (to give a few examples) speaks very quickly/slowly, loud/soft, formally/informally and I find that I quickly adjust and start by trying to mimic how they opened the conversation.

Often you’ll find that the person keeps speaking in the same way but other times, you might find that they immediately change their tone or suddenly speak in a different way which might mean I adjust my tone as well and mirror them differently.

I was in a meeting last week with a guy who was very informal to the point he would throw a few swear words in here and there. As we spoke more, I found that the more informally I spoke, the more he spoke and the better the conversation went. I felt very comfortable speaking with him and the conversation was informal and to the point.

In many cases, you’ll find people who work in professional environments (ie. lawyers, accountants, etc) and perhaps a formal tone is required.

In other cases, I’ve found that some people want to cut to the case and just hear the facts.

In other cases still, I’ve met people who are happy to listen to a presentation and want to hear the whole story before making any decisions.

I think I’m a pretty good judge of quickly understanding what sort of person I’m dealing with and when you work in sales, you pretty much have to be. You need to figure out if the person you’re dealing with wants the long answers or the short ones, if they want details or they want to cut to the chase, etc.

We’re all salespeople when it comes to a job interview when you’re trying to sell yourself to a hiring manager so this is a skill that we all need at one point or another. Certainly, it’s best to go into any interview being professional and to avoid turning it informal since it’s normally expected that the interview remains a formal event. Sometimes though you have interviews where the person interviewing you is very informal – I’ve been in interviews where the hiring manager swore a few times during the conversation – so you’ll run into this situation too. Fortunately the interviewer wasn’t swearing at me…

The bottom line is that you’ll run into pretty much all sorts of personalities in your career and during job searches and you might find that you need to quickly adjust and that mirroring can be one way to help build rapport with that person depending on the situation.

On my other career website, my most popular page and topic related to the career objective. On this page, people can submit their career objective and get it critiqued by me and can read over the hundreds (and counting) of career objectives already submitted by other visitors.

Amazingly I can count on one hand the number of submissions I’ve received that I’d say would pique my interest enough to think about interviewing the person who wrote it if I was a hiring manager.

Most of the time, I’ll get a very generic submission that goes something like this:

Looking for a position with a dynamic company that offers me opportunities to move up within the company and utilize my strong communication skills and who believes in continuing education and training.

Basically it’s a statement that tells me virtually nothing about the person who wrote it and why the reader should interview them (which is the whole point of the career objective) and instead focuses on everything the person wants from the company.

I delete many of the submissions without posting them or critiquing them because are simply lazy attempts by people and aren’t worth reading. But many are ones that I’m sure are ones that are actually used in the person’s resume…and are ones that add nothing to their candidacy for a job.

Do you write your resume and your career objective in particular with your reader (ie. hiring manager) in mind or do you write it with no regard as to who is reading it or why?

I’m convinced that many people simply go through the motions with their resume and just write it because they have to and don’t pay a lot of attention to the purpose of the document ie. to convince the reader that they should interview them.

It also goes a long way I think to explain why people apply for job they aren’t qualified for, don’t manage their references properly, don’t prepare for interviews, etc. People are often lazy and go for quantity-over-quality and think that if they throw enough stuff against the wall something is bound to stick.

When you write your resume, review each statement and ask yourself “so what” until you can’t ask it anymore. Pretend you’re the hiring manager reading what you’ve written and ask yourself if you care about what you’ve just written.

Remember who your audience is (ie. who are you writing for) and remember that the people who tend to read your resume are those who can positively or negatively influence your job search and are typically searching to address a need or problem that they have ie. they need a new staff member.

How are you helping to address that need with what you’ve written?

One of the hardest things to do during a job search can be when you’re walking out of an interview and are trying to figure out if it went well. Often – most of the time in my experience – hiring managers don’t really give you any indication of how well you did so it’s usually hard to figure out.

In rare instances while working as a recruiter, I can recall times when a hiring manager called me following an interview with one of my candidates where the hiring manager all but said “I’m going to hire this person” but by the way they spoke about the person, I knew that’s exactly what was going to happen. Sometimes, you just click with a hiring manager and it becomes obvious to both parties that you want the job and they want to hire you.

I recall one case where the hiring manager called me right after the interview with my candidate to tell me that they’d made a job offer to the person right on the spot.

Most of the time though, it’s hard to figure things out and you have to wait until you either get the thumbs up or down from the hiring authority that you’re dealing with.

While it’s difficult to look for signs that 100% guarantee you are either getting the job or not, there are some things to look for that can help to give you an idea if you should keep moving ahead with your job search or if you might be receiving an offer soon:

Look for “buy signs” from the interviewer: Look for signs from the hiring authority or whoever is interviewing you that indicate interest in you. They are typically in the form of questions that help the interviewer gauge your interest in the job. Buy signs include asking you your salary requirements, the date you can start the job, what other companies you’re interviewing with, if you’re currently considering any other job offers and asking you for references. Strong buy signs could include showing you around the office or where you’d be sitting or when the interviewer unexpectedly brings in other people to interview you which might indicate they want a second opinion or that they want to save the time of having you come back for a second interview if they want to speed things up.

Consider the length of the interview: Certainly, if you’re in and out of an interview in less than 30 minutes, this often isn’t a good sign. Other times, it might not necessarily mean anything but more often than not, when I know a candidate is in for an interview at say 9:00am and my phone rings at 9:30am and the candidate’s name is showing up on the caller ID and they tell me they just finished the interview, I generally assume the interview didn’t go well and usually it didn’t. Conversely I’ve had candidates interview for upwards of 1.5 hours and then get invited back for a second interview of a similar length and then they don’t get the job either so sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Pay attention to how the interview ends: Do you leave the interview and suddenly realize there was no discussion as to what happens next or when you’ll hear from the hiring manager regarding your candidacy? This is often not a good sign but then again, I’ve attended interviews where there was no discussion of when I’ll get a response and then a week later, I got a job offer. If the hiring manager expects to have an answer in say 2 days and one week later you still haven’t heard anything typically something has happened behind the scenes. Perhaps they’re still interviewing other people, maybe they’ve found another person they like more and are trying to wrap things up with them, maybe an internal candidate arose that they are planning to hire.

Again, none of the things mentioned above guarantee anything but they can certainly help to indicate but they might help to give you hints as to which way the hiring manager is thinking with regards to whether or not they should hire you.

I specifically didn’t mention any signs that people often look for from hiring managers that they believe indicate something one way or the other. Having a hiring manager smile at you as you’re leaving the interview or feeling that you made a “connection” with the interviewer doesn’t really mean much to me because often it might be a case of the interviewer simply being polite or where you simply misinterpreted the signals being offered.

The first placement I made as a recruiter – the first time I successfully helped a person find a job with one of our clients – was for a Director-level position with a major bank that was in the process of setting up their IT security division.

The best part was that the job didn’t even officially exist.

When I started speaking with the candidate about the job… well, I couldn’t really talk about the job because “the job” didn’t exist. It hadn’t actually been created. All we knew was that the person I was speaking with would be someone who the bank would be interested to meet.

Basically what happened was that one of my colleagues had just started working with a hiring manager who was responsible for building a new security division for the bank he was employed by. Back in 2000 when this story took place, IT security professionals who held a certification called the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) were in high demand and limited supply.

I had been referred to a guy who not only held his CISSP and was an experienced IT security professional but was starting to think about looking for a new job but wanted a senior level position that would be a good move for him and for his family.

While it took a bit of convincing that he should go over to the bank and meet with the hiring manager for a job that didn’t actually exist, he agreed to do so and the initial meeting went well.

For the second and subsequent interviews, it was agreed between the hiring manager and my candidate that the two would put a job together that met the company’s requirements and that also met my candidate’s requirements and thus, a position was created that he accepted. He started with the company about 5 weeks after the first time I’d spoken with him regarding the opportunity with the bank.

Another example I can think of – this can happen quite frequently actually – was when I sent a candidate out to interview for a job with one of my clients but where both the client and candidate ended up agreeing that the job was not a good match. Instead, the company created a new position for this person that would make use of some of the skills he had that other candidates they’d interviewed did not have.

In the first case, my candidate was hesitant to go interview for a job that didn’t exist and where no job description existed. In the second case, my candidate understood ahead of time that he didn’t have all the skills the client was looking for but was still willing on my suggestion to interview for the job and ended up getting a job more suited to his abilities.

What does this mean to you?

While you want to apply for jobs that fit your profile and interests, don’t be so quick to turn down the opportunity to interview for a job that on the surface may not be exactly what you are looking for. It might not lead to something else but in the two cases I mentioned above, it certainly did.

When I was in business school, I recall doing a group presentation one evening in front of our professor. It was part of a year long project for our Business Policy class and consisted of a meeting with our professor to present our results so far to ensure we were on the right track.

The five of us in our group had designated two people – myself and my colleague Paul – to do the Powerpoint presentation but the five of us were expected to take turns answering questions that our professor might have and to all take part in the session.

Our professor was a good one, a guy I really liked. He was new to the school but had a reputation of being somehow who was tough but fair and among other skills, was very skilled with presentations, interviewing and things of that nature.

At one point during the presentation, he asked us a question and I decided to answer it after a few seconds of dead air where no one else in my group had taken the opportunity to answer it. I inhaled and took a deep breath, paused for a second, and then answered the question.

Our professor responded not by critiquing my answer itself but responded instead to how I answered it. He noted that I’d taken an audible breath in before answering the question and it was loud enough that it indicated to him and to my colleagues that I was about to answer the question!

His point was that I’d used a cue to indicate that I was about to answer the question so that some or all of my four colleagues didn’t all try to answer it at once.

He also commented that after making the audible cue, I paused again before answering the question rather than just blurting out an answer. I didn’t really plan to do this or even consciously do it but he noticed it and referred to how he thought it was a good technique.

It got me to thinking about verbal and non-verbal cues that we give as well as cues that we give either consciously or subconsciously that can help us in some cases and hurt us in others.

In many respects answering a question without listening to what was actually asked can be worse can answering a question incorrectly. Too many times in interviews, people blurt out an answer barely a split second after the interviewer has finished asking it and often, they never really understood the question in the first place. As in the personal example I mentioned above, a second or two of dead air that indicates to the interviewer that you are actually thinking about the answer to their question is not a bad thing.

I can think of numerous interviews where I’ve asked a person a specific situational question – similar to ones they’d actually get asked during an interview with a hiring manager – and they respond by blurting out a generalization to quickly tackle the question and put it behind them rather than giving a specific example.

Typically it involves asking something like “can you give me an example of a time where you did XYZ” and they respond by saying “I can do that” or “I’ve done that many times” as opposed to answering with something specific like “3 months ago I was working on an important project with three other people where….”

It gives interviewers the impression that you’re not a good listener and seem more interested in answering questions quickly than than accurately.

I’ve found that people who answer questions like this often do so to hide a real lack of actual experience and skills in the areas involved. By glossing over their responses, they’re trying to hide their inexperience and lack of knowledge but this tact rarely works.

Sometimes it also causes the person to come across as being too desperate, as they quickly tell the interviewer “I can do that” in response to every question rather than actually showing them what they’ve done.

What is the last thing you say before you leave a job interview?

The best thing you can say is “I want the job.” Assuming you actually want the job of course.

Many people are hesitant to actually ask for the job when they leave an interview but it’s the best thing you can do since that’s really why you and the interviewer are there to begin with. It’s to sort out whether or not you’re the person they’re going to hire for the job in question.

People will assume that the interviewer knows you want the job – why would you attend an interview otherwise – but sometimes you need to look a person in the eyes and tell them what you’re thinking to let them know for sure. Letting them know that you want the job leaves no possibility as to why you’re in the interview and why you should you be picked over your less motivated competitors.

If you are attending an interview and understand that it’s simply the first interview with more to follow, it’s still a good tactic to end the interview by letting the interviewer know you want the job because at this point, they are already figuring out in their head who to weed out from the interview process and pare the list down to a shorter one for the next round of interviews.

If they’re looking to weed the list of people who don’t seem as motivated and who give mixed signals as to their interest in the job, how can you go wrong by telling them in no uncertain terms that this job is one that you’re interested in?

Last month we talked about a few ways to stand out from the pack with regards to your job search. I gave a few examples of things that I’ve seen – as well as one thing I did earlier in my career – to get a leg up on my competitors for jobs.

It got me to thinking about some of the things that people I’ve interviewed for jobs have done that were a bit different from the norm:

1. Resume on a memory stick: I recall back in 2000 when memory sticks and other memory devices were still kind of novelties, a few people I was interviewing for jobs handed me a memory stick with their resume on it. A few years earlier, I remember a guy I knew using a mini CD-Rom to distribute his resume. At the time, I think they were kind of novel ideas but other than being novel and perhaps expensive, I’m not sure I see the point especially these days when we’re used to seeing resumed delivered electronically. Save your money and email your resume.

2. Reference letters and recommendations: Every few weeks, I interview someone who brings a folder of information with them that contains letters of recommendation, copies of their degrees, printed out emails from colleagues that congratulate them for something they did, copies of training courses they’ve taken and other stuff that makes them look good. Often it seems that the person is trying a bit too hard to look good. The most organized, professional people I’ve interviewed tend to bring a copy or two of their resume along and that’s about it. If we need supporting materials like the ones mentioned above, we’ll ask for them.

3. Personal website: These days many people are running their own website(s) and/or blog and probably belong to one or more of the popular social networks. As a recruiter, the most common thing I’ve found in this regard is getting a LinkedIn invite from job searchers that I’ve interviewed and I have no problem accepting the invite and linking back. I think it makes sense. Of course if you’re also going to mention your personal website to recruiters and/or hiring managers you just want to ensure that the material contained therein doesn’t hurt your cause, something we spoke about back on November 21.

The rule of the day relates to no showing an interview, showing up late, and excuses that people give to justify it.

I was kidnapped by aliens.

My car tires were flat, too.

Then I missed the bus.

The dog ate my homework, too.

Fortunately, I haven’t heard any of these excuses for not showing up at an interview (no showing) or being late for one – and I’ve never had to use one myself – but if the excuses given above sounds pretty unbelievable when you read them, remember that they sound even more unbelievable when you try to use them or ones like them and think that someone will believe it.

We already talked about timeliness and not being late but we know that sometimes it does happen and we can’t do anything about it. The question is what do you do about it?

This morning, I was 30 minutes late for a doctor’s appointment but I didn’t care because he’s never on time and I knew it wouldn’t matter. Sure enough, the doc was 35 minutes late so he actually got to the office after I did.

But in an interview – whether with a recruiter or hiring manager – showing up late or not at all just doesn’t cut it.

I’ve only had a small number of cases where a person no shows an interview with me and I can only recall one case where a candidate of mine no showed an interview with one of my clients – although he did have a good excuse and the client was ok to reschedule it.

But I do know of recruiters who have had people simply not show up at a job interview and they never hear from the person again. Weird. Talk about unprofessional.

Bottom line: Plan ahead and show up on time. In the case where you can’t make it on time and know you’re going to be late, make sure you’ve planned ahead. Have your cellphone handy and charged up, and bring the phone number of the person you meeting with so you can call them and let me know before you’re late.

When a person no shows an interview with no legitimate reason, I stop working with them. If they show up late and don’t seem to care, I don’t care either and won’t work with them. If they call ahead and let me know they’re running late, at least I know they’re trying.

It’s not as good as being on time, but it’s better than nothing.

One of the more interesting job placements I made as a recruiter was when I helped a guy get a job as an IT technical support rep for a large financial services firm.

The job itself was fairly standard and the interview process was nothing out of the ordinary although it did involve a written test which is somewhat rare. Most companies don’t do testing especially for a relatively junior role like this, but in this case a skills test was administered as part of the interview process.

My candidate did well in the test and during the first and second interviews as well. I recall him mentioning after the second interview that he really felt he was going to get a job offer.

If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard a job searcher tell me that…

Alas, the job ended up going to someone else, a candidate who was being represented by one of my colleagues, a colleague who incidentally I’m very close with (he was my first manager when I became a recruiter) and he was also the client manager meaning that he was the person dealing directly with the hiring manager and was the account manager for them.

He told me that my candidate was in fact the runner up for the position and had finished second out of about 10 people they’d interviewed. The hiring manager had told my colleague that my candidate had done very well in the interview process but was basically the guy they’d have hired if the guy who ended up getting the job hadn’t been available.

My candidate was very disappointed as he really liked the job, the company and especially the hiring manager. I remember him telling me “I could really learn a lot from this guy” meaning the hiring manager, the guy he’d have worked for had he gotten the job.

In this case as is with so many things in life, finishing in second is like finishing in last because it doesn’t get you anything. Unless you get the job, it probably doesn’t mean much to be told that you were the bridesmaid and not the bride!

Or so we all thought…

About six months pass by and I’m still keeping my eyes open for this job candidate as although he was working, he was still looking for a better job.

Suddenly one day I get a call from my colleague and he asks me if my candidate is still looking for a job to which I reply yes, he was. I’d spoken with him one week earlier and he confirmed he was still looking for a job.

It turns out that the client who had hired someone else for the technical support rep role 6 months earlier needed to hire another person to replace a guy who had been promoted within the company.

Typically a company that faces this situation would do what most companies would do when they need to hire a new person: they go through the usual hiring process and start from scratch.

Fortunately though, the hiring manager for this position didn’t want to do that and didn’t see the point in starting over from scratch. He remembered how much he liked my candidate, remembered how much his team members liked my candidate, and asked my colleague if my candidate might still consider working for them.

My candidate was more than happy to reconsider the job and at the invitation of the hiring manager, went for another interview which was more like a “let’s get to know each other again” interview since they’d met 6 months earlier. They basically reiterated what they had discussed during the interview process 6 months earlier and confirmed what each other was looking for.

The same day of this interview, my candidate got a job offer and he took the job.

The company didn’t bother interviewing anyone else, they just interviewed him.

From the time we got word that they had the job open to the time my candidate got a job offer, only 2 days had passed.

And the company didn’t make my candidate go through the hoops of going through an entire interview process again just because 6 months had passed.

Moral of the story: How many times have you been in touch with a hiring manager after they’ve hired someone else, just to see what’s going on with the company and to see if anything has changed? You never know, maybe the person they hired isn’t working out or maybe when you contact them, the hiring manager recalls how much they liked you and that perhaps they decide to find a place for you in the firm afterall.

I’ve seen that happen.

When you’ve interviewed with a company and even after you don’t get the job but the hiring manager compliments you on your skills and performance, keeping in touch with them and dropping them a quick email a month or two after they hire someone else isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

What have you got to lose at that point?

You might just find that this time around your chances at getting the job are better than last time, just like my candidate found out.