The newspapers and news broadcasts are full of doom and gloom about the state of the economy, we’ve seen the highest rate of job losses and the highest number of people signing onto the live register for many a long year here in Ireland. If you find yourself wanting to move job – or having to move job due to difficult trading conditions or a redundancy – what should you do? How do you go about hunting for a job in 2008? Is it the same as it has always been, or has the advent of the internet forever changed the way in which organisations hire people?
There are three keys to success in any job-hunt. They are essential when times are good, but if you are lacking in any one of them when times are bad, your job-hunt will be over before it begins.
"Weaknesses? Yeah, whaddevah ..."
Someone once said that “Attitude determines altitude” and just because it’s an ancient old cliché, doesn’t mean that it’s not true. For the job-hunt, your attitude is the foundation; it’s the first thing about you that a potential employer will remark upon and if it is in any way ‘off’ that employer will immediately draw a line through your name.
When I lecture on this topic, I always ask this question - “Who counts in the job-hunt process? Who is the process all about?” Allow me to break the answer to you as gently as I do to those audiences:
This process is all about the employer – their needs, their worries, their issues, their timeframe. And in the midst of that, no-one, no-one, cares about you. Build your attitude and approach to your job-hunt from that certainty and you won’t go far wrong. I say this because when I am interviewing, an amazing number of job-hunters come across as self-centred, whiny and petulant. You must not fall into this trap.NOT YOU!
The other part of the Attitude strand is that it can be very difficult to maintain your equilibrium through the rollercoaster of anticipation, expectation and rejection that a job-hunt can involve. It’s a very topsy-turvy process, conducted by a very cold and unfeeling market. Keeping a positive mental attitude in the face of all of this can be very difficult. But. You. Have. To!
2. Knowledge
So, the job-hunt is all about them, therefore it stands to reason that you need to know all about them – the sector, company, competitors, big issues, the opportunities, the problems, the disposition of the interviewer(s). Knowledge is power in the job-hunt and that includes self-knowledge, market knowledge and even insider knowledge.
You have to do a lot of research and you need a network that is feeding in information to you. Your fundamental approach as a job-hunter is to present yourself saying, “I am the answer to your problems.” If the interviewer asks, “Well, what exactly are our problems?” you’d better have some concise and coherent answers. The company you are applying to lives, sleeps, eats and breathes this business – you have to as well. You need to understand what causes the CEO to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. You need to know the context behind that, the specific causes of it, and be ready to talk about your ideas to solve that problem, so that the CEO can sleep soundly in his/her bed at night. Anything less and you’re not a contender. Why? Because you can bank on the certainty that at least one other applicant [and maybe more] for the job will be this clued-in, so you have to be as well.
You can't afford to go for a passing mark in any aspect of your job-hunt and, when it comes to knowledge and insight into the business/sector, you need to be the highest common denominator. Any interviewer who has ever heard the immortal line, "What is it you guys do here exactly?" will know what I mean ...
3. Preparation
So let's assume that you are brim full of a healthy attitude and you have uncovered all the minutae of the business through your digging and research. What are you going to do with all this? The most common error employers see among job-hunters is plain, simple underpreparedness. Once again, remember that the job-hunt is not about you – it’s about you in the context of all the other applicants the hirers are going to see. There will be a spectrum of preparedness among those candidates and you have to be up at the top end of that spectrum.
Put simply, you need to be more clued-in and better prepared than the other candidates. There are no short cuts here – this is a simple matter of perspiration. For so many jobs now, there’s little or nothing to tell between candidates when it comes to qualifications, training or even experience, so the hirers are frequently judging on the intangibles. One key thing that interviewers will be scoring you on is your team fit – you can’t fiddle with that, nor should you. You are who you are, don’t wear a mask in the interview, be who you are and let them make their decision on that basis. But the other big intangible factor that hirers use as a decider is your professionalism – and that you can control.
I see numerous candidates come into the interview room flustered, badly-presented and with a few half-formed ideas that they have never said out loud before. Job interviews are largely predictable, so it really is inexcusable for you to demonstrate ill-preparedness in answer to any of the chestnut questions. Likewise, if you are trying to position yourself as any sort of player in your arena, it is equally inexcusable for you to demonstrate ill-preparedness in response to issue-based questions.
In his Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote that in order to enter battle unafraid, you need to know three things:
- Yourself
- Your opponent
- The terrain
Not rocket science as I say – so while it is simple, it’s not easy.
Part 1 is here
1 comments:
Rowan, these sound an awful lot like the rules for preparing a presentation. And then I realize that these are rules for just about everything in life!
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