March Madness: How to Play the Job-hunting Game to Win

March Madness: How to Play the Job-hunting Game to Win (By: Lou Adler)

It’s hard to win a game when the rules are made up after the winner is chosen.

In hiring this is pretty much the state of affairs. While there are some written rules, no one really follows them. If they did, there wouldn’t be many great people being hired. Unfortunately, most active job-seekers play the wrong game, and then become frustrated as their losses pile up. Recruiters make things worse, since they each use their favorite unwritten rules. Hiring managers compound the problem since most don’t even want to play.

So if you’re serious about a getting a better job, or any job for that matter, you first have to figure out which game is being played. Then you must do everything you can to break the rules and use your own instead.
(Special Note: I’ll be describing some game-winning strategies at a special webcast for job-seekers on March 28. )

The Biggest and Dumbest Rule of Them All: Using Skills-Infested Job Descriptions.

Possessing a list of skills, experiences, and academics using some arbitrary metric is the default rule. HR embraces this rule contending it’s the required legal validation (it isn’t) and sets it in stone, or at least in the HR handbook and ATS system.

The problem with this rule is that having the skills and experiences listed is no guarantee of successful on-the-job performance. A bigger problem is that using this rule eliminates the possibility of considering diversity candidates; light, but high-potential candidates; and top performers from other fields as possibilities.
From a practical standpoint, this default rule is broken every day. People promoted into these same jobs internally are hired based on their performance and potential, not their absolute level of skills and experiences. External candidates who are vouched for by current employees because of their exceptional performance form the second biggest group of people hired who don’t possess all of the skills.
So if you’re a job-seeker who is a top performer, but doesn’t meet the default standard, you’ll have to figure out a different way to get into the game.

The Second Biggest Rule: even if you get the interview, there are no rules for how to select the best candidate.

Techies overvalue tech. Senior managers overvalue their intuition. Less-skilled interviewers defer to their superiors. Candidates are assessed largely on their presentation skills, not their ability and motivation to do the work. And everyone is affected by first impressions. These errors are magnified when using a skills-infested job description, since it allows something other than the actual job to be the benchmark. The actual debriefing session is largely based on an up-down voting system where a safer “no” vote carries more weight than a yes, rewarding the weaker interviewer, since they can never be proved wrong. In these same sessions emotions and feelings are more persuasive than evidence. As a result, the person ultimately selected is often the compromise and least offensive candidate, not necessarily the best person.

There are other rules in the hiring game, but these are the big ones. Throughout my search career I attempted to impose some degree of order to this anarchic-like process. This was the genesis of Performance-based Hiring, based on the idea of defining the actual work as the standard of excellence rather than skills, and the use of a structured evidence-based assessment process rather than individual bias. I’ve been called wild ‘n crazy as a result.

We’ll be discussing how to play the game at the March 28 webcast, but to get ready here’s some quick advice:

1. Unless you’re a perfect fit for the job, don’t apply directly. It will be a waste of time. Some machine will spit you out as unqualified long before some recruiter gives your profile the 15-second review.
2. Use the backdoor to apply. First find out who the hiring manager or department head is. Then send this person a letter (yes, letter) and an email with a link to your LinkedIn profile. Make sure the line under your name on your online profile says you've accomplished something remarkable and job-related, like, “just finished training 12 sales reps and all of them made quota the first year!” In the letter, describe your 2-3 biggest accomplishments that roughly compare to the open job. Suggest that you’d like to arrange a 15-minute call to see if your background matches the company’s hiring needs.
3. Ask about the real job during the first five minutes of the phone screen or interview. If the interviewer is a box-checker, you’ll have no chance if your skills and experience are a bit off the mark. In this case, quickly ask something like, “Rather than wasting a lot of time, could you tell me about the big challenges or problems involved in the job? I can then give you a quick summary of some of my related accomplishments. Then if it makes sense to get serious we can arrange a more in-depth discussion."
4. Find someone credible who can personally vouch for your performance. A book could be written on this technique, but the idea here is that's it's better to be referred by someone rather than applying.

Of course, these aren’t all of the rules, but when someone is using flawed rules, or none at all, you might as well create your own. At least this way you’re more likely to be evaluated based on your ability and past performance, rather than on some arbitrary criteria and the quality of your first impression.
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Lou Adler (@LouA) is the Amazon best-selling author of Hire With Your Head (Wiley, 2007) and the award-winning Nightingale-Conant audio program, Talent Rules! His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, is now available as an Amazon Kindle eBook. You might want to join Lou's new LinkedIn group to discuss hiring related issues.

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Three Deadly Career Traps, and How to Avoid Them



Three deadly career traps, and how to avoid them



One minute a business leader is master of the universe, and the next no one returns his or her calls. How can you avoid this sort of nightmare?

While there are no guarantees in life, there are classic errors that cause smart people to self-destruct. If you avoid these traps, you can protect your career and preserve your ability to be effective.
These principles don't just apply to CEOs. If you are hiring others, you have some degree of power over them. If you purchase goods from other businesses, you have a degree of influence over those vendors. But, yes, the more responsibilities you take on, the more these traps need to concern you.
1.The "ego-driven blind spot" trap: Like the rest of us, you are not perfect. One of the biggest challenges to acquiring power is that fewer and fewer people are willing to give you objective feedback.
If you suddenly are praised as a genius, your internal alarms should sound. You're not smarter than ever, you're just surrounded by people who dare not point out weak points in your reasoning. Everyone has flaws, and it is crucial that you both understand and monitor your own weaknesses.
Set up systems that enable you to detect potential dangers along the paths you are pursuing:

• Encourage employees to submit anonymous feedback.
• From time to time, hold meetings at which the sole purpose of all gathered is to play devil's advocate with regards to your existing strategies.
• Foster a culture in which it is a badge of pride to "beat the control," which means putting forth a strategy that can be proven better than the existing one.
• Engage objective and independent observers whose role is to second guess you. Even if 90% of the time they can't convince you to change course, those occasions on which they prevent you from veering off the road will be invaluable.

2. The "repeat past successes" trap: Successful people tend to repeat the strategies that made them successful. While this often makes sense for a time, the only constant in our world is change. It is difficult to name a company that has had the same level of success for ten years' running. Likewise, over a five to ten year period, your access to information and the sophistication of your technology changes radically; you have to adapt as these fundamentals shift.
I'm not suggesting you follow every fad. Hype and overblown promises abound. But never stop testing your own skills and strategies, even in ways that may seem silly to you. For example, I'd encourage even top executives to invest a little time in learning to code. You are not going to become a programmer, but you won't be able to understand the detail that underlies most businesses unless you understand the details involved in programming.

3. The "use power too personally" trap: It would be futile to count the number of leaders who fell from grace because they crossed a line and used power to have an affair or otherwise feed their own desire for pleasure. This may be the biggest trap of all.
If you want to not only maintain a successful career, but also help lead your company in the right direction, then use power for the benefit of others:

• Empower your employees, so that they can delight your customers.
• Enrich your investors, by viewing their faith in you as a solemn responsibility.
• Enhance the communities in which your organization operates, by understanding that your success is only sustainable if theirs is, too.

Putting things in perspective
The harsh reality is that career traps are just as common as career opportunities. Remain confident but humble, and don't step into an obvious trap.

Article Written by Bruce Kasanoff -
 

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Get your free copy of Simplify the Future, Bruce Kasanoff's short guide to a more successful career and rewarding life. Bruce is a ghostwriter for business leaders, and he blogs at Now Possible.
Image credit: Flickr member Niklas

Why You Should Try to Be a Morning Person

 

You've it heard it before. Morning people get more done. Morning people are more effective at everything they do. Morning people win more often. They might as well just come clean and say what they really mean: Morning people do better in life.
Whether or not you believe this, the reality is that morning people do seem to get an awful lot done, and even night owls have reported that short periods of morning waking have made them feel more productive, even if they really aren't.
And this is my point: even if they really aren't.
As a self-professed genetic night owl who has worked hard to make myself a morning person (to varying degrees of success, depending on the season), I agree that waking up in the morning makes you feel you've done more.
Doing a lot between 1:00 and 4:00 am, like most night owls, invariably makes me feel behind when I drag myself out of bed, circa noon. In contrast, waking at 5:30 am, watching the sun rise (gasp!) and literally feeling that you beat everyone at the first competition of the day -- getting out of bed -- is a feeling that can't be beat.
So try it, even if you're a night owl. And tell me you don't feel you're doing more.
And, when you do try it, think about how to create a great morning routine. My free book, The Present Principle, will help you get there.

Written by: Claire Diaz-Ortiz
Photo: noppharat/Shutterstock

Text, Call, Email, IM, Tweet or Meet?

 

I had the opportunity to participate as a table speaker at a recent National Diversity Council (NDC) Roundtable event. Tyson Foods and Walmart have partnered with the Arkansas Diversity Council (ARDC) of the NDC. The ARDC is committed to transforming workplace communities into environments where people are valued for their uniqueness and differences, and are confident that their contributions matter. As a group, we learned a lot from each other, and we thought we’d share some highlights of our notes.

In today’s organizations, the ability of employees and managers to respect and work with differences along all identity lines is more important than ever before. Advances in technology make generational diversity a topic that should be addressed. For example, it seems like managing generational diversity is somewhat about knowledge, and even more about communication. We definitely don’t want to over generalize, but many of us have experiences where different generations are more comfortable with different methods of communication. We have long known that some people are more visual or more verbal; similarly we also need to consider the tools for communication. Some people are more active users of email or text; while some prefer phone calls, and some still would rather have a face-to-face meeting.
Many organizations impose a single preferred method of communication. They can clearly do that, but like with any diversity opportunity, it leads them to miss out on the chance to optimize team effectiveness.

By Dan Sanker (Original article on Linkedin.com  -http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130228152024-94530-text-call-email-im-tweet-or-meet )