Author Archives: bryandilts

Do you have to tell the truth? How?

Posted on April 2, 2013 | Leave a comment

I had two people axed for falsifying their resumes in a year.  The saddest part is that in both cases the lie that cost them their job was not significant to getting the job.  In other words, if they told the truth they still would have gotten the job, they would still have it.  One was a lie about education.  The other was a lie about a previous job.

So how do you let people know about a problem in an interview and still get the job?  By being accurate and brief.  If you merely attended a school without graduating, say it.   They can ask you about your degrees if they care.  Don’t make up any jobs. If they care about a gap in your resume, they’ll ask.  They understand taking 6 months to find a job.  It happens.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you what to say about a job that was horrible with a boss from… never mind.  That’s tomorrow.

The way you get people to trust you is to be honest.  Gasp!  If you have to talk about something you want to avoid, say only one sentence.  Be accurate and very brief.  Get on to the next question and anwer, the one they will remember.

Something to do today

Write down one sentence replies to questions you don’t want to delve into during an interview.  Go over the list an hour or two before the interview.  Right before the interview read the list of things you want to emphasize.  You need to be thinking positively when you go into your interview.

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Later: Interview like an Eagle – 3

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Top secret job hunting

Read want ads even if you are NOT job hunting

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How to turn your dishwasher into a snowplow

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Posted in Interviews, Quitting or Fired, Resumes

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The unofficial 13th point of the Scout Law is a job interview secret

Posted on April 1, 2013 | Leave a comment

The unofficial, hidden, but occasionally admitted 13th point of the Scout Law is: A Scout is Hungry.

In your interview, you have to be hungry. You have to want to change jobs. You must crave opportunity. You have to believe you can really do something worthwhile in this new job.

A true terrible job interview

One man leaned back and put his feet up on the desk of his interviewer (mentally). He literally then looked over steepled fingers and waited to be told why he should care about working there. He interviewed for 6 months without getting a job. After I beat him to a bloody pulp in an interview debriefing, he got the idea. He had a job offer within a couple of weeks. He was hungry, and he began to let it show.

Assume the best if you have to interview cold. Assume it is the perfect company. Assume that their products sell themselves and that there will be a bright future. Interview like you will get the absolutely perfect job. Be keen, sharp, and ready to start. You have to interview to find out if it is really the team, boss and company you want to join.

Do your research. If you can, do research before your first interview. You can do it after the first interview if necessary. Find out if this is the company for you.

Every call, interview and email should show you are hungry. It should be undeniable that you want a great opportunity.

Hunger is the unofficial 13th point of the Scout Law. Be hungry.

Being in the army is like being in the Boy Scouts, except the Boy Scouts have adult supervision. (Blake Clark)

Something to do today

If you are not hungry, you are probably bored and boring. Find something you can be hungry for.

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I’m preparing  10 Boy Scouts to become Eagle Scouts in the next year. That’s why I will be talking about being an Eagle (Scout) in interviews for a couple of weeks.

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Later: Interview like an Eagle – 13 parts

Start a salary bidding war

Top secret job hunting

Read want ads even if you are NOT job hunting

 

Free career intelligence

How to turn your dishwasher into a snowplow

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Posted in Attitude, Interviews

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How fledging falcons can help you get a great job

Posted on March 29, 2013 | Leave a comment

Each summer we watch a falcon’s nest a dozen floors above the train station in Harrisburg. See it here.  Five falcons fledged our first year.  That means they finally got the maturity and confidence to jump off the ledge and fly. Fledging is learning to fly.

When falcons fledge, they are prepared. They spend time exercising their wings. You see them watching the open sky for days.  When they finally jump off the ledge it is still scarey.  Sometimes they spend the night on a building they didn’t plan to be at.  But, by the next day they have built up enough strength to return to their previous heights.  In a few days they are soaring.

 

Some people decided to fledge the same week as the falcons.  They gave me a call.

One was working at a company that was morally bankrupt.  He put off fledging for a year and built up his financial reserves.  As he felt more secure, he objected more to the blatant discrimination, mean spiritedness, and rough nature of his office. He stopped being a “team player” because he knew the team was being awful. He was fired for being true to himself.  He is finally flying again.

A fledgling job holder came out of the military two years ago.  His specialty didn’t translate into the civilian world.  He has been building up his non-military credibility.  He is ready to move into a second career.  It is something he has been willing to prepare for.

A salesman moved to a new company two months before.  During that two months the company changed direction three times. She knows she cannot sell in that environment.  She has no faith in the leadership.  She will fledged a month after the falcons.  Her skills have been honed for five years.  It’s just a matter of finding the right place to settle.

Prepare to leave your job.  You may stay at your company or leave your company.  You need to prepare to leave your job anyway.  You may even keep the same title you had in the same company, but make your job change.  There is new software to learn, tricks to improve your productivity, and better ways to help your team. Learn them. You may also need to spend time watching the open sky, observing business and your industry.  You need to see where companies and careers are going so you can fly in the changing world we are in.

Fledge. Prepare, then jump off a ledge and fly.

Something to do today

Spend some time staring off into space.  How will your company, your job and industry change in the next five years.  What can you do to be ahead of the change curve?

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Later:             Start a salary bidding war

Top secret job hunting

Read want ads even if you are NOT job hunting

Free career intelligence

How to turn your dishwasher into a snowplow

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Posted in Promotions, Quitting or Fired, talent, Training

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The single most important trick I use to get myself to make phone calls

Posted on March 28, 2013 | Leave a comment

My telephone weighs 470 kilograms if I do not pick it up and make a call out by 8:30 in the morning.    I get nervous.  I can’t pick it up.  I make my living calling people and sometimes I just can’t do it.

So I use a rubber band to help pick it up.  I put the rubber band around my wrist.  Every time I start to think about being nervous I snap it hard against my wrist.  If I pause before picking up the phone, I snap it and pick up the phone.  If I feel nervous, I snap it and pick up the phone and dial somebody, anybody.  The real trick is that I interrupt my thought patterns.  I have a mechanism to deal with nervousness.  The little snap of pain also trains me that nervousness is unpleasant.  More important than the pain. is that I interrupt my negative thoughts.  I start concentrating on the positive, and do something positive.

When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them. (Confucius)

I should have told my daughter how to use a rubber band to change her thought pattern when she and her friend were talking about their fear of needles.  It might have helped her channel her thoughts so she wouldn’t cry before the needle touched her.  Irrational fear or just nervousness can ruin an hour, a day, or a lifetime.  Control the negative by finding something to interrupt the negative thoughts and think about the positive.

You really are what you think about.  If you need to think about something else, figure out a way to do it. I use a rubber band to help pick up the phone.  What do you use to get over nervousness?

Something to do today

Research ways to interrupt your thought patterns and channel them positively.  There are a lot of great books on the subject.  The classics are The New Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, or Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.  Read it. Absorb it.

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Later: Fledging falcons on the DEP building

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Posted in Attitude, Networking, Perseverance, Time management

How you can accidentally make job search success impossible

Posted on March 27, 2013 | Leave a comment

This story relates directly to your job search, phone calls, interviews, writing your resume, and getting a job offer.

Complete panic, worry, and unhealthy fear were created by my 17 year old daughter as she graduated from high school. In an hour she was going to get her wisdom teeth removed. She’d kill me if I use her name, so let’s call her Gina.

Gina and a friend spent a few days swapping stories about cowardice in the face of needles. They talked about it often enough to amplify their concerns. So Gina was panicked about getting the IV before they put her under. The thought of getting near a needle is horrible to her now. Her friend was bragging about cowering against a wall while she was restrained two years ago to get an inoculation. Gina was fantasizing about how badly she would react when the needle gets close.

Gina came back from the oral surgeon alive.  She had tears streaming down her face before the needle even touched her. She had three holes in her arm because they didn’t get it right. I think part of the problem was hers. Competent nurses became incompetent when faced with her dread and complete lack of faith.

People who need to leave their job are often the same way. They focus on visions of starvation and divorce for months and years before they leave.  All the horrors stories they have ever heard play through their mind over and over.  The will to better themselves is frozen and then shattered by fear.

Even worse than mere fear, you can attract all your worst dreams to you.  As you concentrate on horrible possibilities, you will be drawn to those situations.  The characteristics you concentrate on, will be in your new company.

I don’t know the exact mechanism, but most people get the job they think about the most.  If they concentrate on finding a great job, they usually find at least a good one.  If they concentrate on avoiding horrible, mean spirited, lying, deceitful people in their new company, the usually join below average or horrible companies.  They get the coworkers they dreaded. They are trapped in job after job in companies of despair.

Instead of spending your time talking to someone unemployed who lost their job in November of 2011, talk to someone who just got a new job. Talk to people who have made great job choices. Reminisce with folks who did things right.

Look for a job while you are still employed.  Find out about the company you are moving to.  Talk to your new coworkers before you take the job.  There is a lot less danger than you have been worrying about.

If you concentrate on the positive, you will find the good in every experience.  If you concentrate on the negative, you won’t have a good experience, no matter how good the experience is. You can make good things possible or impossible.

Something to do today

Make a list of the people who tell horrible war stories about job changes.  Stay away from them.  Stay away from everyone who teaches you fear and panic.

Buy The New Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, or Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.  Read it. Absorb it.

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Later: The rubber band solution for nervousness

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Posted in Attitude, Focus, Interviews, Negotiating, Networking, Resumes

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What can get you a job, that you learn from spammers?

Posted on March 26, 2013 | Leave a comment

For your job search you have to learn a very important lesson from spammers.

How do they get people to pay attention?

Here is how they get ME to pay attention.  Learn from my weakness.

I never get less than 60 spam emails in a day.  Over a weekend it is always several hundred.  Every once in a while I see a word and phrase in the subject line that I have to investigate.  As a recruiter, one irresistible word is “resume”.  Others are CPA, VB.Net, Senior, relocating, or proven.

Think about people you send your resume to.

Every time a job ad is placed online, someone gets spammed.  They may get 50 to 1000 emails from people wanting a job.  At least half will be totally unqualified.  So the hirer or their receptionist has to skim through them and delete all but the top 10 or 20. While doing it they will delete the resumes of highly qualified people who weren’t careful.

A little carefulness will at least get your resume glanced at.

Take the job ad you are replying to. What are they key words for the ad?  Are there one or two things that appear to be the biggest and most important skills?  You need to figure out the keywords that will force them to open your resume and read it.

Let’s go one step further.  Make sure your resume fits the job ad.  Put those keywords in bold typeface in your resume.  Have 3 or 4 different resumes available to send for slightly different jobs.

Spammers are experts of single words and simple phrases.  They suck their target into their ad.  They know who they want to impress and what they want their victim to do.

Be careful. Figure out who you want to impress.  What keywords can you highlight that will make your ad, your resume, irresistible?

Something to do today

Today take every job ad that interests you and WRITE DOWN the keywords in the ad before you send your resume.  Then highlight the keywords in your resume and in your cover letter.

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Later: The rubber band solution for nervousness

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Posted in Resumes

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Am I psychotic if I trust a neurotic agency recruiter? 8 questions to ask.

Posted on March 25, 2013 | Leave a comment

Agency recruiters are slightly neurotic, money driven, friendly, busy sales people. Neurotics build castles in the air.  Psychotics live in them and don’t ask questions.  Are you psychotic?

Should I trust an agency recruiter?

Only if they are honest.

There are a few recruiters who lie just to keep in practice.  They are the same vile few who discriminate maliciously.  They are a small minority of agency recruiters.  One simple reason that they are so few is that it is bad business.  People stop trusting liars immediately.  They won’t do business with them.  Discrimination based on anything besides actual ability and potential reduces the recruiter’s chances of making a placement.  In other words, it costs a lot of money to be a horrible person.

There are a lot of recruiters who tell “white lies”.   They try to ease their way through the day by avoiding bad news.  They say, “I will find you a job,” when all they are really thinking is, “If I put your resume in the database there is a chance that someday we might get a matching job. Please leave me alone.”

And there are a reasonable number of recruiters who always tell the truth.  They don’t sugar coat it.  They just tell the truth.

How to get a recruiter to tell the truth:

Ask hard questions. Ask those questions often.

Try these:

  • What exactly does that mean?
  • Why?
  • What exactly will you do?”
  • Who precisely will you be presenting me to?
  • What has been done in the last week?
  • How many times was I presented last week?
  • To whom was I presented last week?
  • Did my resume go to HR or a hiring manager?  Who?

It may embarrass the recruiter, but you are more likely to find out what was done if you interrogate him like a policeman would.

You are not psychotic if you trust a neurotic recruiter who you grill mercilessly.  Recruiters want to be honest. Pin them down and you are taking responsibility.  That is smart, not psychotic.

Your job search is really your responsibility. Get solid information about how recruiters are helping you.  A few will lie.  Most will squirm uncomfortably and tell you the truth. It is your life. Take the initiative. Seize the day.

Something to do today

Call all the recruiters who you submitted your resume to.  Ask them exactly what they have done for you in the last two weeks.

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Posted in Recruiters

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Should I change based on what the HR person told me?

Posted on March 22, 2013 | Leave a comment

Yes and no.

Human Resource people are phenomenal.  They are almost always honest.  However, they are human. An HR recruiter who is sorting through 100 resumes each day, scheduling 30 appointments for herself this week, and 50 appointments for managers, may cut corners.  You call and ask, “Why won’t you interview me?” She has no clue who you are and merely pops your name into the database to be sure you are a reject, then replies, “You just didn’t match what we were looking for.”

In reality you may have been a perfect match but the receptionist rejected your resume.  The HR person never saw it. She needs to get back to work and you are an interruption.  If you can get your resume into the manager’s hands some other way, you might be interviewed.

At another company where you have been through three interviews, you eventually get a reject letter.  You call up HR and ask, “Why?”  She may have been told the real reason. She may remember.  In all likelihood she pops your name into the database and sees the box checked, “Other hired.”  She racks her brain, remembers that the winning candidate had two certifications and tells you, “You weren’t as qualified as the person we hired.”  No revelations there, really.  She never talked to the manager about you, only about when the winner starts.

Even when the HR person remembers you personally she often does not have good feedback.  I always pump HR for information.  I trust the best to know exactly what is going on.  I always ask myself if this HR person really had the time to get involved with my candidate.

HR people rarely lie.  They are honest and hardworking.  Often they just don’t know the details you may want to hear from them.

Something to do today

Ask HR for feedback, but don’t put too much emphasis on what they say unless they give you a lot of details relevant only to you.

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Later: Should I trust an agency recruiter?

You can learn from spammers, but don’t spam

The rubber band solution for nervousness

Leave a comment

Posted in Finding jobs, Focus, Interviews, Perseverance

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5 ways to get and use 20 second interview prime times

Posted on March 21, 2013 | Leave a comment

Here is an example of how to blow an interview, and how to fix it.

I asked what time it was. George told me how to build a watch.  Then he went further and told me how to refine the metal, hunt jewels for the movement, and make the glass to cover it.  I was never so grateful for silence as when he stopped.

You only have 20 seconds before the average person stops listening to you, according to one study.  For some people you have less.  In interviews, you may never be listened to.  Often the interviewer merely asks a question and then starts thinking of what to say next. Nervousness and unfamiliarity with the task at hand makes the task of really listening harder for interviewers.

Some good ways to refocus the interviewer every 20 seconds are:

  1. Pauses and silence, especially when accompanied by a sudden smile.
  2. Say how many things you will talk about, then count, “First…., Second…”
  3. Stop to ask, “Is this what you wanted to know?”
  4. Summarize.  Say, “The 10 second summary is…”
  5. Change your mood: notch up your intensity, humor or passion.

The more safe or technical the subject, the more likely the answer is to be long. The listener is also less likely to pay attention.  Shorten your answers and use refocusing techniques.  You’ll be more likely to get the job because the person listened to you.

Something to do today

Listen to yourself talk.  When asked the time, do you tell how to build a watch?

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Later: Should I trust an HR recruiter?

Should I trust an agency recruiter?

You can learn from spammers, but don’t spam

The rubber band solution for nervousness

Leave a comment

Posted in Interviews

Tagged , ,

Why superman would lose his job today in a layoff

Posted on March 20, 2013 | Leave a comment

Superman would be fired today. As a matter of fact, Superman is the target for layoffs in many jobs. In today’s business environment there are times your job cannot be saved, especially if you are superior.

Peter was a highly skilled and paid IBM mainframe computer systems administrator.  EDS asked him to become a Unix computer expert. He took the courses and started gaining experience.  Nine months later he was laid off.  EDS decided they could hire a kid out of college for half of what they were paying him.  His high level IBM mainframe skills were not needed in Harrisburg.  EDS paid him well for 20 years, they didn’t figure they owed him anything.  Peter was “laid off” for following the career plan his company suggested.

There are 3 basic reasons one person is laid off and their coworker is not.

  1. You made too many mistakes. You were really fired for cause.
  2. You had fewer skills or less seniority.
  3. You were incredibly skilled, but too overpaid for the new role they needed filled.

Most people see number one or two coming.  They consider them fair even if it hurts horribly to lose a job.  Number three is the toughest one.  You are fired for your excellence.  Someone cheaper and less skilled is kept.  It feels wrong, but from a business point of view, it may be essential.  You can’t overpay to get a job done and stay in business.

Never lose sight of what exactly you are doing for your company TODAY.  If technology or cheap labor is turning your job into a commodity, start major retraining today.  As a matter of fact, never stop retraining and improving your skills.  It may seem like a lot of work, but if you are being paid more than $10 an hour, there is already someone else offering to do your job for less.  Make sure a cheap worker doesn’t have the skills to replace you.

Something to do today

If you have survived layoffs in the past, figure out why.  If you have received substantial raises or no raises recently, make sure you are still a keeper.

And as a thought about finding your next job:

There are three kinds of death in this world. There’s heart death, there’s brain death, and there’s being off the network. (Guy Almes)

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Later: 20 second interview prime time

Should I trust an HR recruiter?

Should I trust an agency recruiter?

You can learn from spammers, but don’t spam

Leave a comment

Posted in Economy, Promotions, Quitting or Fired, Raises, talent

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