Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.
The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.
JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter discusses the purpose of a phone interview from the employer’s perspective and from yours.
[spp-transcript]
SUMMARY
I’m going to discuss it from both sides.
Your site is easy – – your purpose is to get to the face-to-face interview. In almost every case I’ve ever heard of, no one is hired on the basis of a phone interview. There are some exceptions but they are very rare.
The employer’s perspective is, (1) to confirm that what piqued their interest about your background is actually true and that you have relevant experience. So they may have some questions about whether your experiences relevant; there may be some things causing them some concern.
They may also be looking for confirmation. In other words, they may see your background as a great fit and they’re trying to confirm that.
In fact, what they can confirm is a couple of pieces of objective information that may come through subjective questioning. That may sound contradictory, but the questions that they use to evaluate someone involve some degree of subjectivity.
The other thing that they can evaluate is your energy level. Do you have passion, excitement, zeal for what you do? How does that come across in your voice? Do you speak in a slow, methodical, monotone manner that puts people to sleep? Do you demonstrate a degree of enthusiasm and excitement?
Then on your side of it, how do you demonstrate that you have some passion for what you do? How do you demonstrate that they don’t have to worry about you and that you do fit the role?
If the call is coming out of the blue from a corporation, not a third-party recruiter, I want to encourage you to say something like, “I’d like to speak with you. Can we schedule a time later in the day to talk?”
Then you can reference your notes about the job and background check the individual on LinkedIn, and before you jump off, say something like, “before we jump off, would you tell me a little bit about the position please?”
For the call that is actually scheduled, you start the conversation (remember, scheduling can come from a third-party recruiter), “I spoke in the Jeff Altman about the position and he gave me a brief summary, but I want to get your take on the job. Would you tell me about the position and as you see it and what I can do to help?”
That way they’re going to start off by talking about the position as it currently is (remember, jobs often change from the time that the job description was developed and no one ever goes back to modify them. This helps you avoid using obsolete information on your interview).
As a result, when they continue by asking you, “tell me about yourself,” you have the best information possible at the beginning of the conversation so that you can talk about what you’ve done that matters to them and not just simply talk about what you’ve done. You can tailor your answers to make those points.
Remember: the purpose of a phone interview is either to screen you in or screen you out.
They don’t want to waste time with someone who isn’t a fit. They want to confirm that you have the right background or get answers to a few basic questions that gave them hesitancy.
[/spp-transcript]
Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday. Will
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.
JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.
Whether you are a recruiter or a job hunter, an entrepreneur, solopreneur or not working, there are only a few things you control.
[spp-transcript]
A lot of people struggle as they battle with their conditioning.
I’m a believer that from the time we were little, we’ve been conditioned to but to be “nice” obedient people– to work in systems and show no individuality.
I remember being brought the kindergarten by my Mom, introduced to my teacher and is the two of them brought me over to my table, beings told something like, “I’ll be back later. This is Miss Judge. Do wish he tells you to do, okay?”
It didn’t take long for the school system to translate that into, “shut up. Be quiet. Do what you told. Learn what we tell you to learn. Regurgitate a bunch of it on command… Or else.”
The or else translates into, “you won’t get good grades and into a good college.”
Eventually, I went to a good university and the threat there was, “or else you won’t get a good job.”
It took a while, but I got a job after college and the threat there became, “or else we’ll fire you.”
Although it didn’t happen to me, it has happened to many many people. They get to that good job, perform well and are fired anyway.
Conditioning over a lifetime to be docile, compliant, docile and nice to everyone is hard to break. I’m certainly not going to suggest that you be rude to everyone. That would be an obnoxious way to live life.
However, you don’t have to conform if you don’t want to.
I want to wake you up to consciousness that being nice, being obedient, doing what you’re told doesn’t guarantee you anything. It’s like that old episode of, “Seinfeld,” where George says, “it’s just not working out for me. I had so much promise. I was personable. I was bright… Maybe not in an academic way. I always know when someone is uncomfortable at a party. It’s become very clear to me as I was sitting out there that every decision I’ve ever made in my life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of what I wanted to be.”
“Every instinct I have in life, whether it’s something to wear or something to eat, has been wrong.”
So as a waitress approaches and confirms his usual order of tuna on toast, coleslaw and a cup of coffee, George makes his first break with habit and calls her back, saying he always has tuna on toast.
“Nothing has ever worked out for me with tuna on toast. I want the complete opposite of tuna on toast! Chicken salad on rye. Untoasted! With potato salad! And a cup of tea!”
The episode progresses to George walking up to an attractive woman (doing the opposite of what he would normally do) and commenting how he couldn’t help notice that she looked over at his direction. He’s told by her that he is ordered the same thing as she has and in a funny moment (watch the video on YouTube), says “my name is George. I’m unemployed and living with my parents.” After all, that’s the opposite of what he would normally do. She responds with, “I’m Victoria. Hi!” Doing the opposite worked!
I want to remind you that there are things that you control and there are things you don’t control.
For example, if you have a dream of doing something in particular, and you’re making the excuses of why it can’t be done and why you’re not the messenger for that idea, you can’t control the outcome but what you can do is put in the time and the effort each and every day and taking small incremental steps then move you in the direction that you want to be moving to
you can’t control whether someone’s going to buy that product or service, however, you can create the “art.” You can do the thing you dream of doing or else one day you wake up and realize, “is that all there is?” You realize one day that is over in the blink of an eye and that a lifetime is not a long time.
You can control your time but not the outcome. You can control your effort or give up on your effort and just go through the motions.
A few days ago, Yankee first baseman Mark Teixiera announced his retirement from baseball at the end of the season. “I gave you everything I had,” and he started crying. “It wasn’t always enough, but I tried my best.”
There is more to your life than what you doing. It doesn’t really matter what’s on HBO or Netflix. When you’re ready to die, do you think you going to say, “I watch the Sopranos,“ or, “I watched House of Cards,” or whatever show you got hooked on one point of your life. It’s the least important thing you can imagine.
I’m always reminded of the story of an old friend of mine whose uncle had passed away. The uncle and his father were popular music composers in the 1920s. He had grown up to be a mathematician and a good one at that. As he spoke to me, he said, “I don’t want to die with the music inside of me.”
You got music inside of you and you may struggle to find it but I want to encourage you to unplug for a little while. Spend some time doing what you’ve always thought of doing, not because that’s the right thing but because it will lead you to the right thing.
Just choose where you start and just keep going. It may not be that project but you will learn through experimentation.
As adults, we are conditioned by employers that everything we do has to be, “right” first time and every time.
Or else.
See how that conditioning works?
As a human being, if you conduct yourself that way, the world becomes very small.
So let’s get you out there and trying some new things. Go experiment! Have some fun! Make some mistakes (as long as no one is going to get hurt physically by them) and as long as you not risking every dime in your bank account in this process, it’s okay. Try some things. For example, if you’re thinking of starting a business to it on the side, don’t do it full-time yet.
Try working on this project at 430 in the morning before you go to work. At the end of the day, your mind may create too many excuses about why you can’t do it. Get up earlier. It’s only an hour, hour and a half, two hours of sleep I am asking for you to sacrifice.
You’ll fall asleep earlier at night. Big deal!
At the end of the day, this is the music in you and it needs to be let out . . . Or else.
And you don’t want to find out what that “or else,” is.
I know what it is for me. Don’t learn the lesson the hard way for yourself.
Do you really think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.
The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.
JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.
Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.
The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.
JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter explains what you should do when you get a phone call from someone who wants to interview you from out of the blue.
[spp-transcript]
Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.
JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.
Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.
The skills needed to find a job are different yet complement the skills needed to do a job.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.
JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.
Today’s question is, “How do I write my LinkedIn profile in a way that will attract recruiters but not give my boss reason to think am looking for a job?” The original question says but without making my boss think I’m looking for a job. S
So this is very easy question for me and let me just point out that the question involves a couple of parts.
The first part I will address is really the second part of the question – – without making my boss think I’m looking for a job.
To do this, you have to turn off notifications () this assumes that you’re actually connected with your boss on LinkedIn; if you are not connected to them, there is nothing to worry about.
Let’s assume that you are connected. You have to go to the privacy settings and turn off notifications to them. In this way, your boss is not notified of an update to your account.
Next, back to the profile itself and how to attract recruiters. So the way to attract recruiters is by thinking of LinkedIn as a search engine. You optimize your profile for that search engine to attract customers.
The way to do that is to think of SEO and, in your particular case, I want to research keywords that describe what you do and how do you do it.
Look at open jobs on LinkedIn for positions of what you do.
Look for common terms that are used. Don’t just think that because you use that language other people it. Rather, firms may use different language. Research on LinkedIn the job openings and research and on Indeed and SimplyHired for job openings for what you do. You’ll start to notice is that there are certain common threads to all the descriptions and what you’re looking for. What are the common terms used. Let’s say you look at 10 job descriptions and six of them use the same terms or descriptive phrases. Start incorporating those terms and descriptive phrases into your profile particularly in the summary area and in the description of more recent work.
Make it easy for people to reach out to you by including your phone number and email address in the summary area of your profile. Recruiters love that because they don’t have to use an inMail to reach out to you you’ve made it easy for them to actually contact you rather than just having a better profile [/spp-transcript]
Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday. Will
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.
JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter explains the questions to ask yourself and potential employers in order to decide which job offer to accept.
[spp-transcript]
Let’s talk about making the decision where to join. I want to concede— money is a factor the money shouldn’t be the only factor.
If you didn’t do it at the time you began your job search, it’s important for you to sit down and ask yourself this question, “What’s most important to me in the next job or organization? What do I need to see your here to believe it’s the right place for me to join?”
Once you have your answers to that, I want you to prioritize the three or four things that are most important to you. Then figure out what questions you can ask the employer to figure out whether they can provide it for you.
From there, you’ll probably need to have a little bit of give-and-take with yourself. After all, firms are not going to change the way they are doing business to accommodate one single individual.
Doing this helps you get clear so that you don’t make decisions with rose-colored glasses on, you know what I mean – – that view of the organization as though it’s perfect. Beware of what you’re stepping into so that maybe you can negotiate some changes in the offer or circumstances or maybe you can’t. At least or clear about it.
There’s are questions, however, that tends to be overlooked including:
“Where can I do my best work?”
“Where can I really thrive?”
I’ll speak from personal experience. It’s so important to be in an organization where people ”get you.” You want to be the place where people get you, support you, and encourage you, give you atta boys and atta girls that support you in your times of triumph and support you in your times of struggle.
As someone who worked in organization who didn’t get me, I woke up one day and asked myself, “why is it that so many people respect what I do and the people I work with struggle to really see what I’m able to do?” Once I saw that dichotomy, I was able to break away and do different things.
I’ll simply say that’s my story and you’ll have your own version of it. I’ve learned that it’s so important to choose an organization where you can thrive, excel, achieve and really grow and not just be another cog in the machine we you are robotically doing the tasks assigned to you without feedback, respect, support and other things.
Make sure you take that into the equation—“ Is this a place where I can really thrive and do my best work?”
[/spp-transcript]
Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.
JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.
Q. What do you do if you are afraid your employer will know you’re looking for a job?
[spp-transcript]
This comes from a variety of situations where I have been coaching people
Who are concerned that their current employer is going to find out that they’re looking. I see this also showing up on tv on the show, “Better Call Saul.” She was about to give notice when her boss found that she was interviewing with a competitor. What do you do to head this off?
The first thing is that if you are posting your resume on a job board paid to make it a blind resume; by that I mean a resume with no name on it, no address and your email is obscured. On one site, email addresses appear as lots of letters and numbers at their domain name. Contact request by employers and recruiters are sent to you by the site for you to respond. This means your employer never knows that that is you on a website wanting to be contacted about job opportunities.
Take out the name of your current firm and call it a major such and such, like Major Bank or Major Tech Firm– you get the idea.
Look at the text describing the background and make sure there is nothing revealing there to help them figure out that you work for their company. For example, take any acronyms that are unique to their company or any department names that might reveal who you work for. Instead, describe it generically.
[/spp-transcript]
Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.
JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.
Q, Between LinkedIn, job boards, recruiters and company websites, which is the best way to find a position?
[spp-transcript]
A. The correct answer is none of the above.
I got this question asked of me and started laughing to myself because it indicates that this person really doesn’t know what they’re doing.
You see, ultimately with LinkedIn, yes, you can be a magnet for organizations. You have to SEO your profile. You’ll have to have skills that are demonstrable in your profile. You’ll need a track record of success and keyword optimize your profile page.
Company websites. Job boards. Same issue. You run into the applicant tracking system. Why would you ever want to apply for a job through an applicant tracking system?
Recruiters. Usually, don’t know if this one is competent, do you? You don’t know if they are trustworthy.
All four avenues are not really desirable.
What’s the best way to find a job question? Networking.
[/spp-transcript]
Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell as they think you need to know to take the job they after representing so they collect their payday.
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter has been a career coach and recruiter for what seems like one hundred years.
JobSearchCoachingHQ.com is there to change that with great advice for job hunters—videos, my books and guides to job hunting, podcasts, articles, PLUS a community for you to ask questions of PLUS the ability to ask me questions where I function as your ally with no conflict of interest answering your questions.
