Have an interview coming up?
Picture this. I was at a networking event last winter. It was cold outside, but quite warm in the room. Most of us balanced winter coats and heavy bags. I was making small talk with a few people when a new guy approached the group.
“Damn, you guys are carrying a ton of s–t,” he said. “You know, you can check your s–t for free at the coat check.” Boom! Instant credibility suck. I get that he was trying to help us, but none of us paid him any mind after that introduction.
Whether you're asking for a raise or negotiating your salary at a new job, one thing stays consistent: it's nerve-racking.
But it's also necessary. An analysis by Salary.com suggests that not negotiating could potentially cost you more than a million dollars over the course of your career. Not that knowing that makes it any easier.
Since we haven't descended into SMS texting interviews quite yet (praise be to Google), phone interviews are still a regular staple of the job hunter. Today I'm telegraphing over some top tips for owning the phone interview.
You thought the interview went OK. Maybe it could’ve gone better, but certainly you didn’t totally bomb it, right? So why hasn’t anyone called to set up the next interview or extend an offer? What went wrong? Why is this not progressing? Why? What now? Uggghh.
Been there? It’s admittedly a tough spot, even more so if you’ve just learned that you won’t be moving on in the process, yet no one has bothered to spell out after the interview how or why you’ve been ruled out.
If it were me interviewing a candidate, I couldn't force my lips to form some of the idiotic questions that people ask on a job interview. I just couldn't do it!
Do you really think you're going to make better hires by asking people "What do you bring to the team?" when they don't know the people on the team, don't know what you need and don't even know what you're hiring for?
Sadly, plenty of job-seekers have learned from harsh experience that recruiters and hiring managers themselves often don't know what they're hiring for!
Most of us get nervous at the thought of being judged for our every word. In theory, a job interview should be a mutually investigative event between a potential employer and a potential employee, each thoroughly and unbiasedly evaluating the other to determine the potential professional fit.
However, most of the time, a job interview boils down to how good of an impression you make on your prospective employer. If you say the right things at the right time, you might land the job regardless of your résumé or skill set. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time, and all your experience might go down the drain. The power of a single word can sometimes sway this critical impression, and if you want to be successful, you'll have to steer clear of some of the worst offenders:
There are some things you just shouldn't do on LinkedIn.
Kim Brown is an assistant director for Syracuse University's Career Services department. She spends a good portion of her day looking over LinkedIn profiles for job seekers and students.
She makes sure candidates are putting their best foot forward on LinkedIn. Here are the most common mistakes Brown sees job seekers make on LinkedIn.
Everyone wants to build a successful career: To get promoted, to gain new responsibility and authority, to earn a higher salary....
(Well, maybe not everyone, but you get the point.) Even though I held a number of responsible positions, I also made a number of missteps (one of my nicknames was CLMJ, for Career Limiting Move Jeff), so sometimes I'm not be the best person to give career advice.
So I found someone a lot better: Jim Whitehurst. Jim has gone from management consultant at Boston Consulting Group to Treasurer of Delta Airlines to Chief Operating Officer of Delta Airlines… and is now the CEO of Red Hat, the $1.1 billion open source software company. (And he's the author of The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Purpose.)
If you come into my office for a job interview, I don’t really care "where you see yourself in five years," or what your top skills and weaknesses are. What I care about is how you feel about time travel. That’s right, time travel. The question I prefer? “If I could take you 300 years to the past, or take you from 300 years ago and into the present, where do you think you would survive longer?”
You see, over the past decade I’ve interviewed close to 1,000 job-seekers in the field of B2B sales. And while many of them have glowing references or Ivy League degrees, only a select few have the skills you really need to make it in this field: relatability, charisma, imagination and quick thinking.
Having coached the full range of job seekers, from entry-level candidates to C-suite executives, I learned the one job interview tactic that makes the difference between success and failure. This same tactic works for coaches and consultants who want to build a larger practice, secure more clients and do it more quickly.
The true genius of this tactic comes from Anthony Parinello, the author of the best-selling book Selling to VITO: The Very Important Top Officer. Tony has written about this technique as the foundation of successful selling to executives at the top of their organizations. If you don’t know Tony’s work, go to http://www.vitoselling.com – and grab the free download and enjoy meeting this world-class sales trainer.
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