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Congratulations, you were scheduled for an interview. Unless you have had your head in the sand or you have just recently thrown your hat into the job ring; you likely know that interviews are harder than ever to secure and successful job placement is evolving into the Holy Grail for professionals.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the nationwide unemployment rate has risen to 7.6% as of the date of this blog. A number of economists and economic bloggers assert that the real unemployment rate in the US is between 9% and 13%. No matter which side of the spectrum you find plausible, everyone seems to agree and understand that the US job market is in crisis. When you factor into the unemployment numbers the impact of retirees searching for jobs to offset eroding retirement portfolios and the underemployed searching to escape positions that fail to pay or motivate properly; you are left with a miserable awareness that the ratio of job seekers to available jobs is not in the job seeker’s favor.
Therefore, if you are busily preparing for an interview, you may want to take notice of a few key tips for competing in a saturated job market.
1. Preparation:
DO YOUR HOMEWORK! Unbelievably, there are professionals successfully scheduling interviews and then failing to prepare for their prized interview slot. Consider the following simple tasks:
A. Check out the LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter page or otherwise scan Google for the individual that you believe will be conducting the interview. Their postings will give you some insight into the interviewer’s area of responsibilities, their previous employers, and their alumni associations. All of these morsels of data are key to your ability to build rapport during the interview. If you have the email address of the interviewer, you may consider sending an invite via LinkedIn.
B. Google the company. The usual suspects are great pages to hit: about-us, news, and service offerings. In addition, you will gather a great deal of information from the annual report. Depending upon your area of expertise, you may want to hit the financials, the SEC filings, and information about key strategic partners. This info will help you to converse intelligently with your interviewer about the prospective employer’s business model, partners, and standing in the market.
C. Check your directions. To avoid being late, make sure you have a map and a route planned out the night before the interview. If you are traveling in to another city for the interview, make sure you know how long it takes you to get from the hotel or the airport to your interview location. You should easily add 30 minutes to the time estimated on any mapping software if that is your only gauge of travel time. Whatever form of preparation you do for travel, build in a buffer. It is much better to be early to your interview than late or hurried.
2. During the interview conversation, make sure you consider the following:
A. Be positive and up beat: Recruiters have recently reported in one of our surveys that a tremendous challenge with interviews in today’s job market is the candidate’s overwhelming display of negativity. We have heard countless stories about candidates lamenting, during an interview, the state of the economy and the tremendous number of candidates flooding the job market today. It is fair to think that some people are just having relevant, timely dialogues; however, it is easy to tell you that those job seekers are just setting the stage for a poor outcome. An interview, as one recruiter put it, is all about you…and you don’t want to have anything negative to say when talking about you.
B. Be local: In a buyer’s market, employers can afford to be much more finicky than they have in the past decade. Today, employers can invest a little more time in the job search and successfully bring in candidates that are in the local market to fill job requirements as opposed to conducting costly national searches. Or can they? Interestingly, many candidates in advance of the interview are proactively making themselves available in a local market by scouting out some domicile arrangements in cities far from where they currently reside. Assuming affordability, this is not a bad idea. We recommend that if you hold yourself out as local in an interview and then are awarded the role, you need to be an authentic local candidate and not a pretend one. Keep your commitments. Nothing is worse than being known as an untrustworthy professional
C. Be reasonable about your rate/compensation requirements: Our surveys are indicating that clients are looking for staffing agencies to lighten their rate to the client by 5% to 15%. As you can imagine, the margins involved in our recruiting world full of vendor management offices (VMO) and recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) will not support such a dramatic decrease. Where do you think it comes from? Yes, the candidate of course. Thus, recruiting firms that are still in business have pushed the rate decrease down to their consultant and employee base. For new job requirements, they are coming off the blocks with rates 20% lower in some technology and engineering roles. So, when you consider what your compensation requirements must include, think about how critical getting the job may be for you now.
D. Listen: Our resident expert reports that people listen 125-250 words per minute at 1000-3000 wpm. Ironically, people are believed by some experts to only hear about 25% of the time. To make matters worse the same experts also report that 75% of the time people are distracted, inattentive, and tend to forget. If ever there was an event to get your listening skills right…it would be in the job interview. You need to stay tuned in to your interviewer and pay attention to everything they say. Interrupting is a signal that you are not fully listening, rather, you are hearing a cue and engaging before the other speaker completes a thought. Employers want to know you can listen.
E. Have a plan for Q&A: Employers are increasingly tossing in behavioral and analytics questions to the interview. Your response is measured against known and anticipated results to determine if you would be a good fit for their environment, and in the current job market, many employers can afford to be highly selective and seek not only a good fit but the best fit. Consider a few questions recently listed from an interview with Google (found on the web):
• How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?
• Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew?
• How many times a day does clock’s hands overlap?
Knowing your personality type is a great first start to planning a listening and communication plan.
7. Be humble…but remember to self promote. This one seems self-explanatory. However, it is a challenge if you over think the tip. Essentially, you want to avoid taking credit for something your team did as though you, alone, completed the task. You want to make sure you do not overstate your contribution to previous employers. Alternatively, you do not want to miss a chance to add some positive information points about yourself or your experience at relevant times in the interview. Use the interview as a careful tool to self promote without adding in shameless plugs.
A great way to help keep you balanced between humility and self-promotion is to organize and memorize a few key points that you can drop into most conversations that cover topics in your relevant field and job preference.
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