This Is How to Get Your Next Job: An Inside Look at What Employers Really Want

Introduction

Why I Had to Write This Book

THERE WERE TWO REASONS.

Reason #1: I couldn’t stand listening to myself yell at the radio any longer.

I don’t know about you, but I hate listening to myself yell—no matter what. But particularly when I’m alone and the point I’m yelling about will not make a lick of difference since no one but my dog and two cats can hear it.

In this case, I was getting ready for the day. Across the room I could hear the radio with a news report about jobs and unemployment.

An unemployed woman in Kansas was talking about how she sent out her resume with the same cover letter to 150 employers. And I didn’t get a single response, she exclaimed.

Don’t do that! I yelled.

The interviewer asked a man in Florida what kind of work he’d like to do. He replied, I’m looking for something where I can use my skills with people and maybe with computers.

Don’t say that! I shouted.

When asked what she wanted, a young woman who had been trying to get work for a year said, Well, ya know, I’m like a, well, I wanna be like a English and communications major. But I can’t find a job in it.

Yes, I yelled again: Don’t do that!

Reason #2: I wanted to know if my husband was crazy.

For more than six months I had watched him try to find an employee for his small business. He’d come home complaining about what potential employees were saying and doing in e-mails and during interviews he’d held at Starbucks, over lunch, in his office, and by phone.

Then one night he said, That’s it. End of story. No more. I give up. He was genuinely sad and discouraged about the whole thing.

Was it him? Was he right? I started talking to employers at small, medium, and large companies to find out. All over the country, they were experiencing the same thing. They had job openings, but said they couldn’t find good people to fill them. They also told me what candidates were doing that led them to that conclusion. Turns out there was a complete mismatch of priorities and expectations.

If only workers could hear this. With the job market thick with fear and so much desperation among workers and misunderstanding between them and employers, I thought, perhaps I could bridge the gap a bit.

Most job hunters tell me their goal is to stand out to get noticed and hired—and how hard that is. Employers agree it’s important to stand out. But, they say, it’s not that hard. It’s a matter of not doing what everybody else is doing.

Before you delve into those specifics, which are in my don’t do that/do this advice (Chapters 3 through 6), it’s key that you read Chapters 1 and 2. Because to apply the Don’ts and Do’s effectively, you’ll need to understand:

How employers think today

How to stand out among the millions you’re competing with

Why employers may not be hiring you

What employers are looking for and why they’d hire you

How you want to come across to employers

How to show employers who you really are

How to show employers you’ve got the skills the job calls for and are the type of person they want

How to reinforce the impression you want to make before, during, and after an interview

That and more is what I cover in the first two chapters and will refer back to again and again in later chapters.

The Don’ts and Do’s I share apply to anyone who sets out to find employment today. You could be looking for your first job, be a seasoned worker, be going for a completely new career, or be looking for contract work. The things you should never do, say, or wear have been done, said, and worn by 25-year-olds as well as senior executives.

How did I come up with the specific Don’ts? Mostly from the employers I talked to who had jobs to fill in the east, the south, or the middle parts of the United States, out west, in Canada, and in other places in the world.

I also looked at what my clients and readers were doing and saying and what I saw getting in their way of being hired—especially today. I listened to the parents of new college graduates who told me what their kids were doing. Many people don’t even realize that what they’re doing is making the difference between rejection and a job offer.

There is no question that looking for work can be daunting. It’s a bit like hitchhiking, which I wouldn’t recommend these days. After an hour of cars and trucks whizzing by, desperation kicks in. You wonder, Will anyone ever stop and pick me up? Or will I be here, standing on the side of this road, forever?

It may be hard to fathom at this moment, but you will not be standing in this place forever. In time, you will get noticed, appreciated, and hired by the right employer. This book will show you how to make that moment happen a whole lot sooner.

one

You Are What You Seem

Everyone’s got an opinion. You do. My mother certainly does—especially about my hair, shoes, and clutter in my closets. But that’s another matter and nothing you need to concern yourself with.

The opinions you should be attentive to are those held by the big They—the people who can hire you.

These are people like Eric Zuckerman, Rob Basso, Michael Zwick, Dianne Durkin, Sander Daniels, Allan Young, and Alex Churchill, all successful business owners. These folks—plus plenty more like them—have jobs they’re trying to fill. Jobs? Yes. There are jobs begging to be filled.

Maybe they have the perfect one for you. Maybe not. Later, you’ll hear more about them and other hiring managers hungry for the right people to work at their companies. For now, you’ll want to hear what they and others who hire people for their organizations think, and why. Because understanding that will help you stand out among millions of other workers competing for the same jobs and will be your ticket to getting hired today and in the future.

Of course they don’t represent every employer. But what they think overall is pretty much what every employer I’ve talked to—from small to medium and large companies in all types of industries—has told me. You don’t have to talk to every employer to know this: When it comes to finding good people, it’s really, really, really hard.

It’s so hard, some employers have given up looking.

How can that be? With millions of able-bodied unemployed or unhappily employed workers, why can’t they find people to hire? What do they want that they’re not finding?

It’s not what you’d assume—the right technical or functional skills—or what most people call the right skills.

And it’s not the right experience either.

Yes, experience and skill matter . . .

And yes, some jobs in information technology, finance, engineering, and other areas are hard to fill because special talents and functional skills are needed to perform the jobs. At a time when everyone (politicians, employers, headhunters, recruiters, and futurists) is obsessed with talking about jobs, many also point to skill and talent shortages. In some areas.

And yes, for many jobs, education can also be a factor.

But . . .

For now, assume you have the so-called right experience, technical skills, or education. Because, as you’ll hear in a moment, even with all of that, employers say they still can’t find the right people.

You may be the most talented person who ever walked the good earth and possess the right and proper technical skills. But you still may not get hired. Here’s why: it’s how you seem.

Why They Aren’t Hiring You

I asked employers this simple question: Why didn’t you hire the last 10 people you interviewed? And you know what every one of them said? It was because of how the job applicant seemed based on how he or she acted. Before, during, or after an interview. Sometimes it was what a person did or didn’t do, or said or didn’t say. In an e-mail. On the phone. Or face-to-face. It could happen in the first three minutes of an interview. Or as one manager told me, in the last three minutes of walking an interviewee toward the exit.

Fair or not, the employers said the behaviors people exhibited were very revealing. The behavior influenced them so much that it predicted not only what kind of employee someone might be and whether the person could do the job, but also that elusive, hard-to-nail-down issue: whether the person would be a good fit at their company. Turns out most people didn’t fit, according to the employers. More on fit later.

There’s a correlation between the response you send an employer and how someone would be on the job. It is predictive of someone’s performance.

—The conclusion of Bill Strauss, chairman of Strauss & Troy, a Cincinnati law firm, after trying to find a part-time marketing director

I should point out that these employers didn’t come to this conclusion lightly. It took months—even a year—of interviewing candidates for the open positions they had that led them to feel discouraged and disheartened about finding good people for their organizations. As one CEO of a small East Coast business told me after dozens and dozens of interviews, We all know there is massive unemployment. What I want to know is, where are the qualified, hardworking employees?

So according to employers eager to hire and build their businesses, whether to hire or not hire someone—or even bring them in for an interview—came down to this: how the job applicant seemed.

Now before you have a conniption, thinking: What can I do about that? I don’t control how employers think about me and how I seem to them! hear me—and them—out.

Naturally you don’t control their brains. How someone feels about you when they first meet you depends on many things. According to Jack Mayer, professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, factors that can influence how someone feels about you include a person’s frame of mind at a particular moment. The temperature outside. Whether you’re similar to that person and whether you make the person feel appreciated. Personal beliefs, preconceptions, and experiences will factor in.

And sometimes you can’t do a darn thing about meeting someone’s criteria. Mayer, who once helped a car dealership with hiring, told me that the sales manager said the only criterion he used when deciding whether to hire someone was the applicant’s astrological sign.

But that’s a whole other issue.

When it comes to people deciding how they feel about you, the process is not straightforward and perfectly logical. They don’t analyze what they see, but we do react to how we feel when we see it . . . and after a few moments, we have formulated a conclusion, according to Kenneth Manges, forensic psychologist.

Since employers are human, they also do what psychologists call negative filtering—focusing on the negative and failing to pay attention to the positive, according to psychologist Elizabeth Lombardo.

The human mind is a mismatch detector, always noticing what’s wrong before it notices what’s right, explains sociologist BJ Gallagher. Our brains are hardwired to notice what’s missing, out of place, or faulty.

So guess what happens? There’s a tendency to see one less-than-perfect trait and overgeneralize that you’re not the right fit, says Lombardo.

But you still have more power than you think to influence what they conclude about you: by what you say and do. And I’m going to share with you what you can stop doing and saying, and start doing and saying so that they stay interested. These are things you do control. For now, let’s focus on how they think and what’s behind it.

Their thinking may seem picky. But when you hear it from their side, it’s not so unreasonable. In fact, if you were in their shoes, you’d probably think and feel the same way. We’ll test that later.

Even in a good economy, getting hired or not comes down to whether you can do the job and what kind of employee you seem to be. Even in prosperous, thriving times, people with the power to hire are deciding who you are by how you seem—based on how you act.

But in a tenuous economy—when employers don’t have the luxury, time, or money to make costly hiring mistakes—they put even more emphasis on how you are and how you seem to them, and whether to hire you as a result. In difficult economic times, there is less leeway and less tendency to give someone the benefit of the doubt when it comes to hiring. Employers will be more watchful of what you say and do. And they should be.

They’ve Been Burned

Some have become cynical and wary because of bad experiences with new hires in recent years. These were people given the benefit of the doubt. People in whom the employers had faith. People they wanted to believe could do the job.

Take the time Dianne Durkin, president of Loyalty Factor, a consulting and training firm in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, hired a new person after months of interviews. The night before the employee was to start, Durkin got an e-mail from the person saying, I decided not to take the job, with no explanation.

The next person she hired (who had been out of work for two years) came into her office his second day and said, Boy, you guys really work hard. I don’t think I can do this, and left.

So now when she interviews, she watches for signs that someone is unprofessional and unreliable. One simple test: Do they follow up as they say they will?

To test this and determine whether someone is right for the company she gives assessment tests. But it’s not just the answers to the test she looks at. It’s how the person handles it.

In one instance, she gave an applicant the test to take home with the agreement that the person would send the results the next morning.

The applicant calls later that morning saying she just woke up, explains Durkin. She sounded very confused, saying she just had a big argument with her husband. I think she was drunk or on drugs, she was so incoherent. She called back three or four times, saying, ‘I really need this job.’

Then there was the person who might have had the right skill set, but wanted to be paid under the table. Can you blame her for thinking the applicant was dishonest?

An entrepreneur in Ohio spent nearly $30,000 to prepare his office and train his first employee. He had interviewed about 75 people over six months before he hired a young woman just two years out of college. After four-and-a-half months on the job his new employee, who never mentioned being unhappy, drove to the office in the middle of the night, packed up her things, and e-mailed her resignation.

Durkin, who consults with other small businesses, says, I hear daily from hiring managers saying they cannot find competent professional candidates who have a solid work ethic, dress properly, and have good communications skills. They ask me, when hiring, how do you read between the lines to determine real competence vs. fluff?

One way employers do that is to pay close attention to what job hunters say and do, and how that matches up with what they’re looking for. Here, more specifically, is what they have concluded about the hundreds of job hunters they’ve encountered, how the employers came to those conclusions, and what led them to say, Sorry, we’re not interested.

Bad Behavior Is Making the Rounds

WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

When an applicant shared vivid details about her personal problems in an interview, warning bells went off for Eric Zuckerman, president of PacTeam Group, a global manufacturer of custom-designed displays, packaging, and fixtures in Paramus, New Jersey, and around the world.

For twenty minutes she’s going on about how this happened and then that happened and how she got really depressed. Then she went to see a doctor.

What did he conclude? Her behavior showed poor judgment and lack of professionalism.

Another time he was interviewing a woman who seemed to have some skills the project management role needed—good design sense and creativity. The applicant left him a DVD with her portfolio to review after the interview.

I go home and I’m sitting there with my wife, pop in the DVD and it’s a bunch of artistic nude poses of her [the interviewee]. Then there’s a video of her interviewing a naked couple who are in bed with each other.

Now come on, you can’t help but wonder: What was she thinking? Wouldn’t this incident lead any sensible person to question the kind of judgment she’d display on the job?

Here’s a less dramatic example of poor judgment that ruined an applicant’s chances for an offer. This incident took place at Thumb-tack.com, a San Francisco–based firm that directs people to services in their cities. The CEO, along with the co-founder and director of user happiness, Sander Daniels, was holding a lengthy interview.

We took a short break to eat a little dinner, explains Daniels. "Our CEO, being friendly, said we have soda and seltzer and jokingly mentioned that the candidate could have a beer. And he did. He proceeded to finish the beer while our chief engineer interviewed him.

He was a younger person and it didn’t occur to him that drinking a beer during an interview wasn’t a great idea. He didn’t make the cut.

The guy was no slouch. But when it came to showing good judgment this was not a slick move.

YOU SURE ARE TOUCHY

Daniels got insight into another applicant who initially did well when asked complicated technical questions. But then he broke down when we pushed him on technical areas with which he wasn’t familiar. He gave vague answers and when asked for details "became exasperated and said, ‘Look, I don’t know as much about hardware—my answers to the other