Basic Insights for Candidates & Managers
Basic Insights for Candidates and Managers
By Miki Saxon of Leadership Turn
Greetings! I want thank Darlene for inviting me to guest blog here on Interview Chatter and I thought that I’d start by offering up some basic insights that you may already know, but might have missed along the way.
After 20+ years as a recruiter and another ten coaching line managers on all phases of staffing, (as well as culture, retention and motivation), I’ve concluded that around 95% dislike interviewing—no matter which side of the desk they’re on.
It’s a tossup who hates resumes more, the candidates who need to write them or managers who have to read them.
Managers hire because they have a “problem,” therefore, the best way to get hired is to present yourself as the “solution” to it. That means customizing your resume for any position about which you are truly serious and not just sending it to cover your bases.
Objectives should be about what you can do for the company and not what you want the company to do for you.
Managers want to know what you’ve accomplished in preference to long, bulleted list of skills and job actions. Most people don’t think this through well enough. My favorite example is the manager who listed managing a group of 100 engineers as an accomplishment. It wasn’t, it was his job, what he was hired to do. After thinking about this, he said that since he’d been taken over three years before he hadn’t lost any people and that 95% of the projects were on time/in-budget and asked if that counted.
At first look, people scan, they don’t read resumes, so save bullets for those points that you really want to stand out—preferably accomplishments.
You are a product and your resume is a product sheet. The purpose of a product sheet is to tell potential buyers enough to get them to check the product out in person (interview it) and buy (hire) it.
You can ask any professional question during an interview if you ask it politely. If you’re truly polite and the interviewer is still annoyed then you’ve found out a great deal about her style and the culture.
When interviewing, giving or receiving an offer isn’t the main goal; giving and getting enough information to know if it’s a good fit in order to make an informed decision is.
If you honestly don’t want to work for a company/manager, why do you want an offer?
Always give proper notice, never bad-mouth or gossip about past managers/companies and don’t interview for the heck of it. The work world is very small and reputations are very fragile. This applies as much to managers as to candidates.
Never forget that cyberspace is forever, so that anything you, or others, post to the Net will be available for future bosses, colleagues, friends, great, great grandchildren and beyond to freely peruse.
Whether you’re the candidate or the manager, it’s your responsibility to be prepared for the interview. Professionalism and common courtesy require candidates to research the company, products, etc., and mangers to read the resume and know the position in depth. If either side doesn’t do that, why in the world would you want to hire/work for that person?
Hiring/being hired is like getting married—the things you don’t like while dating/interviewing don’t magically change once the deal goes through.
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