Regular conversation doesn’t happen in thirty-second chunks. A typical networking conversation tends to flow more like this:

YOU: Hi, I’m Jane - and you?

HIM: I’m Carl. Nice to meet you, Jane. What brought you here tonight?

YOU: Oh, my friend Maggie is one of the organizers. I’ve never been to a meetup before. How about you?

CARL: I come to this group occasionally, and always have fun when I do. So, are you a marketing person?

YOU: I’m an event planner, so I’m in the same vein. I didn’t see any event planning meetups so I tagged along with Jane at this marketing one.

CARL: So, what sorts of events do you work on? Do you work for yourself?

Nobody in this little drama gets more than ten or fifteen seconds of airtime before the microphone (virtually) shifts back to the other person. This is how the standard back-and-forth between two new acquaintances tends to unfold. So, where’s the moment for the interminable Elevator Speech? There isn’t one. Imagine if Carl and Jane had met one another this way:

YOU: Hi, I’m Jane – and you?

HIM: I’m Carl. It’s nice to meet you, Jane. What brought you here tonight?

YOU: Oh, my friend Maggie is one of the organizers. I’ve never been to a meetup before. How about you?

CARL: I come to this group occasionally, and always have fun when I do. So, are you a marketing person?

YOU: I’m an Events Planner. I work for High Point Events, a national event-planning firm, and I’m the local person here in Springfield. I plan and execute events from bar mitzvahs to corporate sales offsites, everything from choosing the venue to arranging the content, audio visuals and budget to create an unforgettable emotional experience for the participants. I work with most of the big hotels in town and many of our largest employers, from XYZ Labs to Charisma Confections and many others. I’ve been in the business for eight years, and I love what I do.

CARL: Wow….that’s outstanding. Gosh, you know what, I just spotted my old boss coming in – I’ve got to go say hello. Nice to meet you Angela — er, Paula? Sorry — have a great evening!

What went wrong? Jane’s carefully rehearsed Elevator Speech let fly into Carl’s face like a blast of bug spray. Most of us would rather be poked in the eye with a sharp stick than subjected to a new acquaintance’s audio business spiel. That’s why Elevator Speeches are so annoying for the recipients — they’re one-way aural assaults. Real conversations don’t include blocks of commercials that sound the way Jane’s Elevator Speech does. We can do better.

We can stay in a natural networking conversation and convey a bit of our business or career information by way of a less intrusive self-intro, called a Bumper Sticker. A bumper sticker is short — like the bumper stickers we put on our cars. It’s brief and pithy. It says just a little (not a three-fold brochure’s worth) about what we do on the job. It leaves the listener, if he or she is interested in our what-I-do-all-day story, in a position to ask us for more details. If the listener isn’t interested, that’s okay too! The Bumper Sticker doesn’t force information into the hapless newcomer’s ear canals. It says “If you want to know more about my job, just ask me.”

Here are some Bumper Sticker examples to illustrate the concept. Each one is an answer to the question “So, what do you do?”

• I’m an events planner - I specialize in big out-of-town events, like sales meetings.
• I help manufacturers get their process costs way down by simplifying how they build things.
• I run marketing, site content and PR for a very cool jobs-research site called Glassdoor.com.
• I’m the CFO for an organic chocolate maker here in Springfield.

A Bumper Sticker intro has five advantages over an Elevator Speech, namely:

• It lets the listener, rather than the speaker, decide how much information is enough and how much is too much.
• It keeps the focus on the two people in the conversation (or three, or more) rather than on anyone’s job description (which may well be the least interesting thing about you, in any case).
• It doesn’t hijack the conversation and turn it into a sales pitch, or run the risk of appearing to do so.
• It gives the new acquaintance just enough information to remember “Oh yes, Jane, the event planner.” It doesn’t overwhelm the listener with detail or sales-y overkill.
• It is polite!

Try a Bumper Sticker in place of an Elevator Speech at your next networking outing. If you’re on the fence, try holding your breath for thirty seconds and see how it feels. Thirty seconds, as it turns out, is an eternity. Remember that the point of networking is to create relationships, not to thwart them before they’ve begun, and you may swear off Elevator Speeches for good.

Elevator Speech Out! Bumper Sticker In: Advice For Career Networking is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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I’ve been at my job five years, and there are aspects of the job that I love and others I hate. It’s a job I could do in my sleep, and there aren’t really any opportunities for advancement. At the same time, I’m well paid and the benefits are fantastic. The leadership team is great and my manager has been very good to me. On the other hand, salary increases have been tiny for the past two years. It’s a family-owned company and the business is about as recession-proof as you can get, so I’m grateful for that. For the first few years in the job, I was learning a lot, but I’m pretty well versed now and the learning has tapered off dramatically. I basically drift through each day, dialing it in and doing what the job requires and no more, since the opportunity to get a significant pay increase is basically nil. Part of me wants to look for another job, but another part of me says “You’re about to vest in your 401(k) matching contribution, and why leave a stable environment for an unknown one?” What is your advice?

Thanks,

Fred

________________________
Dear Fred,

Management consultants tell their CEO clients, “Innovate, or die.” When my great-granddad pulled barges down the Chicago Canal, it was possible (and almost guaranteed, for many people) to do a job that required little to no intellectual heavy lifting and involved no complex problem-solving. Today, in the Knowledge Economy, people who don’t stretch themselves to climb bigger and bigger hills and who don’t learn on the job fall behind. They lose muscle tone, you might say – they’re just not as sharp, inquisitive or creative in their thinking as people whose jobs require them to untangle thorny issues every day.

There’s another issue worth pondering, too, one that you may not have thought about. Many people would say that it is unethical to accept a hefty salary and do as little for the company as you say you are doing. Can you feel good about yourself when you drift through each day, going through the motions, in a company that you say has treated you extremely well? I am certain that you hold yourself to a higher standard than that in your outside-of-work relationships, Fred. Apart from the mental and professional stagnation that you’re experiencing, don’t you want a job where you get up every morning full of enthusiasm, dying to get to work and dig into the interesting issues the company is facing? When you find that next assignment, it will be better for you, better for your employers (the old and new), and better for the currently-unemployed person who will get your current job when you move on to greener pastures. You are way too young, Fred (whatever your age) to go to sleep in your career. Two years in a rut is two too many. Get your job-search engine up and running again, Fred, get into your next challenging assignment and pave the way for a sharp, deserving someone to take over the role that isn’t making your heart beat faster anymore.

Best,

Liz

Is It Ethical To Stay In A Well Paid Job And Just Coast Through? is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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That’s what we’ve all been told (and told, and told again).

I’m not so sure. Job seekers tend to forget what they bring to the party, and over-fifty job-hunters in particular tend to focus on what they don’t have (youth, ace Facebooking skills) rather than what they do. There are reams of horrible advice out there, advising over-fifty job-hunters to change their hair, get an iPad, learn to text, and otherwise spend their energy on pointless ‘just-for-show’ activities rather than zeroing in on what employers need. I see fifty-plus job seekers getting job offers every day, and here’s what I see them doing to get there:

• They forget about their age. Your age is your age. You can’t change it – so why stress about it? I don’t know about you, but I’d rather go to New York for the weekend than spend my money shooting Botox into my face. Successful fifty-plus job seekers (and entrepreneurs, and others) don’t focus on their age, and fret about it. They focus on the buyer’s/client’s/employer’s need, and how to solve it.
• They make the job hunt about the prize, not the obstacles. People who get great jobs don’t lob resumes into the void and fill out job applications online. They go after employers with the sorts of problems they reckon they can fix – because they’ve solved those very same problems before. When you’re talking with a hiring manager (via email, LinkedIn, snail mail or on the telephone) about his biggest problem, and you’re able to talk about how you slew that very same dragon before, do you think the hiring manager is going to worry that you’re fifty- or sixty-something? No way. He’s going to be delighted that someone showed up to save the day.
• They zero in on the employers they’re targeting. In order to get a hiring manager’s attention, we have to be able to talk about her business pain. Maybe supplier quality is a huge problem. Maybe the firm’s sales efforts are making gains against the competition. How can we get this “pain” information? It takes careful research – let’s say, an hour per employer – reading the company’s own website, checking out Google Web and Google News, and following message boards and blog posts to see what’s up inside your employer of choice. Every organization has challenges, and so does every hiring manager. Our task is to find out what’s keeping our hiring manager up at night. Once we get that answer, our age becomes a massive non-issue.
• They use the direct approach. The black hole is for people who want to job-hunt more than they want to start working. Don’t trust that wretched black hole with your future. You’ve got to approach hiring managers directly, and when you do, you’ve got to talk about their issues, not your own magnificent career. No one will care about you until you make them care, by talking about something that’s relevant to them – namely, the dragon they’re staring down and your own experience with similar dragons.

Smart job seekers of any age are also consultants. They dig in, before the interview and during it, to find out where a hiring manager’s pain is and whether that pain is the same type the job seeker has spent years alleviating. When they do that, the employer can’t afford to care if the job seeker is young, old, or Martian – they’re going to be interested in you. Revamp your resume for every opportunity, taking off the irrelevant stuff and beefing up what employers most want to hear about – namely, the problems you’ve solved that are most like the ones the employer is facing now. Your expert wisdom is needed. Your job is to locate those employers who could most use your help, and to reach out to tell them why. Go get ‘em!

Hope For The Over-Fifty Job Seeker? is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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“Exactly!” she said. “I lay low. I follow orders and keep a smile on my face. That’s my deal.”

“So what’s going on?” I asked her.

“Listen to this,” Angie said. “I’ve been at my job for six years, working hard, trying to please the boss. Today my manager says to me, ‘Angela, you’ve been selected for a very desirable training program.’ He had to pick one person for this very sought-after training course, and he picked me.”

“So that’s good, right?” I wondered.

“It’s not that great,” she replied. “If I begin this training program, I’m giving up my Monday and Wednesday nights for six months. The company pays for the course, but not for my time. I could deal with that, but the other part of the deal is that I’m being trained for a specific, very specialized job. Once the course is finished, I’d start this job, and pretty much be locked into it for the long term.”

“And this job – it’s not your cup of tea…?” I prompted her.

“It’s a totally boring, pigeon-hole job that would bore me to tears in three minutes,” Angela said. “Plus, if I micro-specialize like that, I’m limiting my career possibilities like crazy.”

“So you told the boss to give the training course to someone else?” I asked.

“That’s right, and he was shocked,” she said. “He was actually speechless. Finally he said, ‘I can’t believe it. I hand-picked you for this role.’”

“How do you feel?” I wanted to know.

“I feel great,” she said. “I’m sorry for my boss, but he’ll find someone who’s dying to do the highly specialized work that the new job requires, and I’ll do the sort of work I should be doing.”

“But you asked me if I think you’re a risk-taker, a few minutes ago,” I said. “What does risk tolerance have to do with it?”

“Well, I’ve never been a risk-taker, as you said,” she answered. “I would never have questioned my career path, if it hadn’t been for this incident. My mantra has always been ‘If the company thinks I’m right for the job, I guess I am.’ But when my boss laid this training program on me, it hit me that I’d better take control of my own career path. My boss knows what’s good for him, but not what’s good for me. I’m in charge of my future. I can’t leave my career path up to my boss, or anyone else.”

“You’re driving the bus,” I added.

“You got it,” Angela said. “Now that I’ve had a thunk on the side of the head, I’m going to make some goals and start ticking ‘em off. My boss did me a huge favor today, even if it did require a minute or two of unpleasantness.”

“He’ll be fine,” I said.

“We all will,” said Angie.

Whose Career Plan Are You On? is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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This is surely the case in the matter of Imane Boudlal vs. the Walt Disney Company. According to the LA Times , Imane was hired to work at a Walt Disney theme park, where every employee who deals with the public is seen as a cast member. Each cast member is issued a costume (uniform) and required to wear it on the job.  Two years after she began working for Disney, Ms. Boudlal asked for permission to wear a hijab – a headscarf – to work, and when her request was denied, she sued the company for employment discrimination on religious grounds.

As a former HR exec and a workplace commentator, I tend to side with the employee in these matters. In this case, I didn’t have an easy time doing that. Why did Ms. Boudlal wait two years before deciding that her religion compels her to wear a hijab to work? It’s a theme park. Can Disney allow this employee to wear her chosen article of attire, and refuse Rastafarians who want to wear dreadlocks, or Orthodox Jews who want to wear curly forelocks to their jobs at the theme park? I can’t make the argument that an employer’s requirement to accommodate the religious requirements of its employees goes quite that far.

If I started a religion called the Church of Maximum Flamboyance and required my adherents to wear feather-studded Las Vegas showgirl costumes, I wouldn’t expect many employers to welcome my disciples onto their payrolls. (Apart from a few casinos in Las Vegas.) And could I blame them? If the dress code rules are made clear up front, then it seems to me that any employee who isn’t comfortable with the dress code can look for a job at a place that’s more hospitable to his or her needs.

By the same token, if you’re a pharmacist who doesn’t want to prescribe birth control pills, you shouldn’t have to. That means you shouldn’t take a job at a pharmacy where people walk in with prescriptions that need filling. You can practice your craft at a hospital pharmacy or anywhere you won’t be put in contact with birth-control-requesting patrons. If you voluntarily take a job with a place where the job requires you to fill birth-control prescriptions, you have to do it – the pharmacy can’t be expected to call in another pharmacist.

The law requires that employers make a reasonable accommodation to allow employees to uphold their religious obligations. That makes sense. If a theme park that requires customer-facing employees to be in uniform is compelled to allow employees to customize their uniforms in a bunch of specific-to-the-employee ways, that wouldn’t be ideal for the theme park’s image. So, I’ve got to side with Disney on this one. That’s my opinion. If you disagree with me, leave a comment below and tell us why!

Is There Room For Religion In The Workplace? is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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I’m a call center manager in a small but busy company. I’m completely on my own when it comes to hiring. I have to place the job ad, screen resumes and interview people. I’m pretty much relying on my gut right now. What are some good interview questions I can ask the call center rep candidates to help weed out the people who couldn’t hack our high-volume environment?

Thanks,

Marty

______________________

Dear Marty,

Let’s start with what we know about the call center job. It’s busy, and your reps have to keep a smile in their voices while they talk to person after person during the day. They have to explain sometimes complicated solutions to people who may not be totally focused on the call, or may not be the brightest people in the history of mankind for that matter. They have to learn your new products and keep on top of other product issues. That’s a lot to ask for! We want to construct interview questions that will show you a person’s intellectual flexibility, and his or her emotional intelligence. A sense of humor wouldn’t be a bad thing, either!

Here are some interview questions that may work well for you, Marty:

Can you share with me what you imagine this call center agent job to be like? What do you think are the most important parts of the job, based on whatever you’ve read and heard and your own experience with call centers?

The candidate’s answer to this question will let you know how tuned-in he or she is. People who come to interviews for call center jobs had better have a good idea of what they’re walking into. If the candidate doesn’t get the volume, the pace, the high level of urgency (people who’ve been sitting in a telephone queue want their questions answered NOW, as you know) and the need for kid-glove customer service, he or she is not your guy (or gal).

As you think about working in our call center, what do you think you’d need from me, your manager, in order to be successful?

Here again, we’re checking to see whether the candidate has put him- or herself mentally into the job. If s/he has, the answer will be something like “I’ll need training, of course. I’ll need a way to find out what’s changing in the product mix, pricing, delivery or whatever else can change from day-to-day. I’ll need to understand the technology you use and I’ll need to know how to escalate a customer call to my manager if I can’t handle it. I’ll need to know the rules of the road, when I can take time off for instance, and I’ll need continuing training over time so that I can stay on top of the products. I’d love to also know the career path, and what it will take for me to get to whatever the next step in the organization is.” This imaginary candidate is on the ball. He or she has thought through what life on the job will be like, enough to be able to tell you what he or she will need to thrive. A candidate who’s done this kind of thinking could reasonably be expected to show the same initiative on the phones with your customers. If you ask this question and the candidate says, “I don’t really know — I guess I’ll need a desk and a phone,” e.g., you may want to keep looking.

What do you expect the biggest challenges or frustrations on this job to be?

This is about as close to a go/no-go question as you can get. If the candidate says “I haven’t really thought about it,” you’re taking a big risk extending an offer. If the candidate says, “Well, avoiding boredom could be one challenge, and keeping up with the volume of calls without ripping someone’s head off could be another one” you’ve got someone who has already thought through the most likely, daily scenarios on the job. This person has done more than just dash off a resume and send it to you. He or she has done the mental research to imagine what could be challenging on the job, and perhaps has developed some strategies for surmounting those challenges. (That could be your next question: “How do you think you can surmount those challenges?”)

Good luck with the interviewing, Marty, and good luck on your budding HR-not-by-choice career, too!

Yours,

Liz

Smarter Interview Questions For Employers is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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One of the flavors of dangerous job search Kool-Aid making the rounds has to do with career change. This Kool-Aid gets people to believe that they have to give up massive amounts of salary by changing careers. Now, in some cases this can be true. If I’ve been working as the head of Obstetrics and Gynecology at a major research hospital and I decide to buy a pushcart and sell gourmet popcorn, I’m going to take a salary hit. There’s no question about it. For most people, though, changing careers is not an automatic ticket to the end of the salary ski-lift line. Here’s the thing to keep in mind: you’re going to send a resume, and the employer is either going to interview you or not.

If you get the interview, that means they think you’re qualified for the job. If that happens, and if you’re a career-changer, it means you’ve done a good job of showing how your accomplishments in another industry or function equip you for the role you’re pursuing now. You’ve already passed the biggest test of all, the one called “Can this person make it in a new career path?”

Once that happens, you don’t need to worry about a catastrophic career-shift salary reduction. You have to know what your new field pays. You can’t say “Well, I was earning a gazillion dollars a year in my old job, so you guys should pay me that sum, again.” Your new career arena has its own pay scale. You’re going to have to work with that reality. But if an employer was planning to pay its new hire — an Event Planner, let’s say — about sixty thousand dollars, and if you’re the person they’ve identified for the job, then sixty thousand is what you should be paid. The fact that you haven’t done event planning before is completely irrelevant.

If they don’t want you for the job, they shouldn’t hire you! Here’s how your post-offer conversation might go.

THEM: So, Ariana, we’re excited to get you on the team.

YOU: I’m excited, too. I have a lot of ideas I’m dying to share with you. We’re a ways apart on salary. Shall we brainstorm about that?

THEM: Well, I told you that the job could pay up to sixty thousand, but you’re coming in with no event planning experience…

YOU: I totally understand. And here’s my concern about that. You have a big event schedule in front of you. You need someone you’re confident can do a great job for you. Are you sure I’m the person you want to hire?

THEM: Of course you are! We love your energy and your experience in other areas, like trade show planning.

YOU: That’s great. In that case, if I’m the person you believe can best tackle what’s ahead of us, I’d be concerned to take the job without the vote of confidence that the designated salary level — sixty thousand — carries with it. In other words, I don’t want to come in as a provisional Events Planner. If I’m your guy — your gal that is – then that tells me I’m the person you chose above all the other candidates. Some of those folks undoubtedly had tons of Event Planning experience. But your team wants me in the job, and the designated salary for the right candidate is sixty thousand a year. So, that’s the level where I’d be comfortable. Does that make sense?

THEM: I see your point. Let me push some numbers around and get back to you this afternoon.

If you get the nod for the job, you get the salary that was established for the role. If your career-path-switch makes you too risky a candidate, that’s fine. Then, they shouldn’t hire you. They should hire someone else. If you get the offer, you get the money.

It’s a simple idea — or it would be simple, if the dangerous job search Kool-Aid weren’t rocketing through our veins!

How Much Salary Do I Give Up By Changing Careers? is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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“Do you have another kind of leadership experience?” I asked. “I ran an animal shelter,” she replied.

Hurrah! Now we were in business. An animal shelter has lots in common with a call center. My client and I wrote a pain letter that said to the hiring manager, “I wouldn’t be surprised to find that your new call center manager’s typical day will careen between on-the-ground fire-fighting and long-range planning. When I ran a high-volume animal shelter I juggled the same competing short- and long-term priorities, enabling an average of 150 adoptions per week. At the same time, I trained and coached the staff, oversaw the animals’ health and vaccination schedules and navigated a web of complex regulations. I’m happiest in high-energy, high-stakes environments.”

No shock — the woman got an interview for the call center manager opportunity. She didn’t conclude that because she’d never set foot in a call center before, she had no chance at the job. She found the relevance between her old career and the one she was pursuing, and laid it out on paper. Who could resist a candidate who already has a strong sense of what her target job requires – who tells us clearly in her letter that she’s already played a role in that movie?

For twenty years or more, job seekers have been fed and have swallowed the Kool-Aid that says that only title, function and industry carry any relevance weight in a job search. That is a ridiculous fiction. There are huge areas of overlap between roles in completely different industries and business sectors. Our task as career-changers is to find that relevance between past and future, and spell it out. Once we do, hiring managers will roll along with us. They know what life on their open job is like. When we say “Yeah, I have a pretty good idea of what that new hire will be up against, and I’ve actually slain a similar dragon more than once in my career” we have a massive advantage over the typical candidate whose letter reads “I have sixteen years of progressively responsible experience in yada, yada, yada and poached eggs on toast.”

We have a name for the process of spotting and articulating the relevance between roles in different functions and industries. We call it framing. If you’re looking at performing work that is in any way different from work you’ve done in the past, you‘ll need a new frame. You have to first see for yourself, and then describe for the reader, how the Old You will fit comfortably into the New You’s chosen profession. It isn’t hard to find relevance. But if we don’t do that work, we won’t get hired. Employers will say “Why should I hire someone who comes from outside the industry and hasn’t even worked in this function before?” The relevance — the familiarity with the movie that plays out in the hiring manager’s organization every day — is the key, the bridge and the missing link. As soon as we see it, it seems obvious.

Thus a lifelong software engineer can build and step into the frame that says “I’m passionate about helping non-technical people understand and enjoy technology, and excited about the opportunity to become a math and science teacher at the Oakfield Academy” and get nary a raised eyebrow back from a headmaster, although the software engineer hasn’t officially taught school in his life so far.

A former Wall Street money manager can start a business helping artists, thought leaders and public speakers realize their creative and financial aspirations and say with 100% sincerity “I’ve been guiding people to plan for and reach their dreams for over twenty-five years.”

It is 2010, and left-brain thinking is reaching the limit of its usefulness in the career and workplace arena. Linear, data-driven analysis is out, and relevance, context and meaning are in. (Thank goodness.) Complex humans like us have every right (and thanks to whatever entity or evolutionary mechanism created us, also the ability) to see connections between situations and activities that might look disconnected on the surface. We don’t do it just for ourselves, but also to help employers gain the advantage that a fresh pair of eyes and non-stale perspective can bring. Framing is an essential ability for any job seeker in 2010, but a mission-critical tool for career changers. Try it!

Career Reinvention Starts With A New Frame is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

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That job ad is an over-the-top example of a phenomenon that’s abundant everywhere you look. Maybe the rough economy is to blame, but way too many large and small employers seem determined to beat talent away with a stick. Their job ads are unfriendly (“Candidates lacking two or more of these qualifications will not be interviewed or contacted” where we can interject the missing words “you vermin,” undoubtedly left out by mistake).   Their careers sites are like stone-walled fortresses. Their interviewing manner is cold, and their overall hiring processes signal to candidates, “Go away and die.”

What right-thinking company would drive talent away? It sounds incredible. Yet we see it, every day. The best employees, of course, are also the most marketable ones. They get to choose their employers. Companies that treat job seekers like dirt can expect to hire the most-needy people with the fewest alternatives. Here are the top six ways employers signal ‘DO NOT ENTER’:

1. Their auto-responder message is unfriendly.

An auto-responder from an employer’s careers site is not a bad thing in itself. At least when you get the auto-response email message, you know they got your resume. But if you were the one writing that auto-response message, wouldn’t you write “Thanks for sending us your resume! We’re taking a look at it now, or if our office is closed right now, we’ll review your resume as soon as we can. We’ll contact you if it looks like one of our job openings is a good fit for you. Otherwise, we won’t contact you again, but we welcome you to apply through our site whenever you see a job opening that looks right for you.  Have you seen our job seekers’ newsletter? Take a look! It’s at this link (imaginary link here). Thanks again for applying, and enjoy the rest of your week!”

Here’s a shocker: auto-responders from career websites don’t read like our fictional example above. They’re terse and unfriendly. “Your resume has been received and you will be contacted if we wish to interview you” is typical. Why would employers be so forbidding and stand-offish if they wanted great people to work at their company? Beats me. It’s hard to shake that “We rule – you suck” mentality, I guess.

2. Their communications style is hostile.

One friend of mine got a voicemail message that said “This is XYZ Company. [The caller didn't even leave her name.] We will call this number at 2:00 p.m. tomorrow for a phone screen.” In other words, if you have a life that includes an appointment at 2:00 p.m. tomorrow, you’re out of the running. Who wants to work for a company that treats people like livestock? We have to expect that these companies are the ones in the worst financial straits, since organizations that mistreat job seekers tend to treat employees badly also, and badly-treated employees don’t usually take great care of their customers. If your telephone or face-to-face interview begins, “Today, we’re going to ask you questions to decide whether you’ll make it to the next round – if you make it that far, you’ll get to ask some questions yourself” you have my permission to get up and leave the interview. An interview is a two-way conversation. If you don’t get air time – and friendly, open air time at that – hit the road, because you will not like working for this company if you do get the job.

3. They want your life delivered, before an interview.

You can fill out an application form online, and you can provide a writing sample on an online form, too. That’s where I draw the line. I wouldn’t give up your social security number, and I definitely wouldn’t give up your references’ contact information before you’ve so much as talked to a human being in the employer’s shop. That’s your personal information. If an employer wants to know that much about you, they can dang well call you on the phone.

4. They keep you waiting.

It’s normal to sit in a lobby or five or ten minutes, but a thirty-minute wait screams “You are nothing to us.” It’s even worse when they fetch you from the lobby and take you into a windowless conference room and deposit you there. Three to five minutes of that is about as much as most people can stand. Fifteen minutes of abandonment in one of those tiny rooms is torture. We have to take interview-day behaviors very seriously, because at this early stage in the relationship, they don’t own you. If job applicants are treated badly, imagine how they treat their employees!

5. They don’t talk about salary.

By the second interview – or between the first interview and the second one – the employer should bring up salary. It could be a waste of your time to pursue an opportunity if the money isn’t going to work for you. Companies that stall on salary discussions are very often ones that pay galley-slave wages, so beware. Bring up the topic by asking “Shall we talk about compensation, to make sure we’re in the same ballpark?” when the HR person contacts you to set up the second interview. If you get all the way through the pipeline without any dollars discussion (don’t do it!) expect a low-ball offer at the end of the line.

6. They act like they’d be doing you a favor to hire you.

Some companies have invisible IV drips going into their HR team’s arms, where the IV drips are full of the company Kool-Aid. Be cautious of organizations that behave as though getting a job with them would be the greatest thing that ever happened to you. You have value in the equation, too. You’ll be doing some employer a great favor when you choose to work with them. If the company’s attitude is “Get in line – everyone wants to work here” you’re better off somewhere else. That sort of “It’s all about us” behavior is fear-based. That’s how children behave when they feel insecure. Is that the kind of employer you want to work for?

Steer clear of employers who beat away talent with a stick, and if your firm is one of those places, I’d sound the alarm if I were you. If you’re the HR person in charge, you can shift the focus from pushing away talent to welcoming talented people into your sphere. It’s a change of mindset, like so many other hard and important HR initiatives. If you’re the CEO of your organization, there’s no time to waste. Talent-unfriendly employers aren’t the ones most likely to thrive in the global marketplace. Thank goodness for market forces!

Are Companies Beating Talent Away With A Stick? is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

Related posts:

1. Talent Shortage? Companies Better Suit Up and Prepare to Play
2. Arrogance of Talent Supply Threatens To Continue Resume Black Hole
3. The Resume/Profile/CV Tsunami – Hit by the Talent Wave

Hiring processes are too slow, too cumbersome, and too stuffed with red-tape bureaucracy to allow employers to make thoughtful decisions about the people they’re evaluating. The typical recruiting process is full of unnecessary steps and pointless slights and insults to job-seekers. None of this does an employer any good, but it preserves order (or the appearance of order) and keeps bureaucrats busy, so you don’t find many organizations willing to scrap the broken process and start over. Still, if a CEO were inclined to re-design the recruiting process to make it work for living human people, here are five ways he or she could go about it:

• Add a reality requirement to job requisitions

It’s bad enough to see job requisitions that require applicants to hold three specific degrees and eight certifications, have twenty years of experience in ten-year-old technologies, and also have superpowers. It’s worse when the imaginary job candidate is expected to bring all these assets to a firm for a shockingly low wage. If you wanted your recruiting process to make sense, you’d reality-check your job requisitions before they can be posted. Beyond the critical few job requirements, every other ‘nice to have’ bullet point would cost the hiring manager in budget dollars. After all, the more skills we demand, the more expensive the search will be and the longer it will take.

• Consider internal candidates and friends-of-employees first

Whether it’s the world’s tackiest smokescreen or just a pathetic process breakdown, the outside candidate who goes through three interviews only to hear “You know we also have an internal candidate” is a person with a very good reason for being ticked off. It’s only responsible for an employer to look at internal candidates first, before wasting anyone else’s time. After internal candidates, we should be telling our employees about our job openings so they can let their friends know. Only after those two channels have been exhausted should we put our job openings out for public display. Where are the Process Quality folks when we need them?

• Mandate that the requisition expires in 30 days

If a manager needs help, he or she should jump on it. Yet job candidates sit waiting while processes creak forward, then stop, then lurch forward again. It’s ridiculous. If a hiring manager, aided by a competent HR person, can’t fill a job in 30 days, then the job requirements are unrealistic. Instead of turning over every rock on the beach, we should simplify the job spec so that an actual human being living on Earth can fill it. A great rule to install is the one that says that a job opening explodes on the thirty-first day after posting, and once exploded; it can’t be re-opened in the same year. A couple of those missteps and the manager loses all hiring privileges, if not his or her job. Remember the old

adage, lack of planning on your part doesn’t constitute an emergency on my part? Same deal. Get people in the door fast and fill the dang opening already, or throw in the leadership towel and let more effective people do the hiring for you.

• Focus on the first forty-eight

Can you think of a good reason for a hiring manager to take more than two business days to update a job seeker after a face-to-face interview?

I can’t. If you want to boost the quality of your hires and your organization’s overall leadership quotient, make a rule that every job candidate brought in for an interview needs to get a yes/no message within 48 hours after the interview, no exceptions. That will get your managers thinking about timeliness in the recruiting system. If the manager hasn’t checked in with the candidate by the 48-hour mark, that candidate will be handed to another hiring manager in the company while the slowpoke manager gets to go find new contenders. If you snooze, you lose, right?

• Install quality in hiring metrics

We evaluate HR people in countries across America on the stupidest yardstick ever invented: it’s called ‘Time to Fill’. Once we put in place a thirty-day explosion clause (described above) we can forget about ‘Time to Fill’ and focus on new-hire quality and quality in the recruitment and selection processes themselves. We should evaluate our managers and HR people on how well they lead the charge of bringing new people onto the team, and base our promotion decisions in part on our leaders’ ability to recruit (not just vet, but also sell) talent. If we want to do this right, we’ll ask the job candidates – I’m talking about the people who WEREN’T hired – how well the managers and HR people have done at communicating and answering questions throughout the process. Eye-opening!

We can get much better at managing recruiting now, before the post-bust exodus begins and employers are scrambling for talent. From the language on your careers site to the way you greet interviewees in the lobby, every bit of the process contributes to your message to the marketplace. Is it “We’re dying to get the best people in here, and we suspect you may be one of them” or “You just sit there and wait, ’cause you’re a low priority for us.”?

Fixing The Broken Recruiting Process In Five Easy Steps is a post from: Glassdoor Blog

Related posts:

1. It’s Not You: Recruiting Is Broken!
2. Clearview Counterpoint: Is Corporate Recruiting Broken? Career & HR Experts Debate
3. 12 Gold Standards For Recruiting: How Does Your Employer Measure Up?