I received a cover letter and resume from someone that exuded such bravado . . . a signal that the person is not qualified for the job they applied for.
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If you have a question about job hunting, email me at JobSearchRadio@gmail.com. I can’t answer every question . . . but you knew that!
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 three things job hunters should never put on their resume yet commonly do.
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I want to talk with you today about 3 things to never put on your resume.
1. Objective. “I want to work for a progressive organization where I can rise through the ranks and reach my…” Cut it out! No one reads objectives.. If anything, they are only used to disqualify you for being stupid. Get rid of the object.
2. References are available upon request. It is filler. Everyone knows it is filler. You are trying to balance out the appearance of your resume and had nothing else to say. Get rid of it. We know the references are available upon request. You don’t have to tell us that.
3. This is a biggie especially for you senior people. Get rid of the stuff from 20 years ago. As a matter of fact, in most cases you get rid of the stuff from 15 years ago. It is extraordinarily unusual. If you are ever going to be hired based upon things that you did 15 or 20 years ago.
If you are, in most cases, you want to keep it a secret. After all, you will be taking a huge step backward professionally. Instead, focus in and give the most space to the current work. The further that you go back in time, the less information that you want to provide. Frankly, the older it is, the less valuable it is to the employer.
From their perspective, how much do you think they believe you really remember from 15 or 20 years ago? Next to nothing, of course. Why submit your resume for jobs that require experience that you had from the Stone Ages?
Firms aren’t going to care for it. They are not going to believe it. Get it off your resume altogether!
Maybe you have a sentence or 2, but you are not going to try to really find work based upon stuff (let me use an example of an IT person) work that you did as a programmer back in The Stone Ages… You don’t remember how he did it. You could reconstructed and they don’t have the technology from 20 years ago. Get rid of it.
So, no objectives, no “references are available upon request,” and certainly nothing from 15 to 20 years ago.
[/spp-transcript]
Do you really think employers are trying to help you?
You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much 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 changes 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.
You can order a copy of “Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems” for Kindle for $.99 and receive free Kindle versions of “No BS Resume Advice” and “Interview Preparation.”
There should be a pact between people not to try to do this and respect one another. This is a discussion of bad negotiating
[spp-transcript]
If you have a question about job hunting, email me at JobSearchRadio@gmail.com. I can’t answer every question . . . but you knew that!
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.
I can’t think of few dopier mistakes than this one!
SUMMARY:
I was talking to a friend of mine who is a recruiter who does work all over the country. She was talking about an assignment that she was doing in Puerto Rico and, on this assignment, she was asked to interview people to work in a call center, particularly oral and written communication skills.
So she’s working on the assignment and finding some people who are very well spoken and some who aren’t, just as you would expect. She also started to notice that some of the well spoken individuals are being rejected by hiring managers. She and her partner started asking, “Why is that? Why are these people being turned down? It’s hard to find native speaking English speakers in Puerto Rico. What’s going wrong?”
She spoke to a few hiring managers and found the magic answer. Judging by the title of the show, you know what it is: appearing unmotivated.
What Hiring Managers See
Put yourself in the seat of the hiring manager. Hiring managers have a problem. They want someone who can solve that problem. I know it is hot in Puerto Rico, and the association with hot is lethargic. It is hot out. I feel lethargic. It’s tough to move around.
Too bad! Get over it!
What you always need to do is appear excited and motivated on your interviews. Appearing sluggish or lethargic, or, dare I say, even lazy and unmotivated is the kiss of death, no matter what job you interview for, no matter where in the world it is.
Employers have a problem. You are there to solve it. They are not there to kiss your butt and make you fall in love with them. They want you clamoring for this job, begging for this job, being excited for this job, even when you aren’t… And you want that, too! This way, if you have the skills, you get lots of job offers… You know, lots of job offers. This way, you can go, “I think I want this 1. It pays the most.” Or it doesn’t pay the most, but it has the most upside. Whatever it is, you can pick and choose between different alternatives.
Appearing unmotivated – – Stupid! Take the right hand, move it to your forehead, now hit!
Don’t do something that dumb.
Get Help!
And if you are doing dumb things like this, you need JobSearchCoachingHQ.com. That is my site where you get tons of great information to help you find work. Jobhunting doesn’t have to be hard, difficult, painful, or take so long. It’s just that you don’t know what you are doing.
You start doing it wrong and wonder, “Gee! I’m not getting jobs.” You don’t want to be doing that!
Instead of going out on a lot of stupid interviews or pointless interviews that are pointless because you are not prepared, let me help you.
I have videos, podcasts, articles, books, and me, all they are designed to help you and get to your questions.
We schedule a few minutes to talk, you asked me questions so that you don’t have to worry, we move on. If you want in-depth coaching from me, I provided to scale that makes it very inexpensive.
If you have a question about job hunting, email me at JobSearchRadio@gmail.com. I can’t answer every question . . . but you knew that!
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 a major mistake people make when they are on LinkedIn.
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I want to talk with you about 1 of the mistakes I see time and again on LinkedIn. That way too many people are making with their profiles. It’s what I call, “the skimpy profile.”
Yes, the skimpy profile. The skimpy LinkedIn profile. Maybe you’ve written 2 lines underneath each employer and you have this enormous summary. Maybe. You have this profile I’ve seen all the time – – 2 lines in the region. Employer. 2 lines in the summary. How do you think people are going to find you?
Seriously, how do you think people will find you unless they already know you?
Part of what you use LinkedIn for is to attract opportunities to you. People knock on your metaphorical door and reach out to you to say, “hey, I have an opportunity. Let’s talk.” You say yes or no, after you hear about the opportunity. Not before; after. Then, if you think about it, if you have 2 lines there, there are probably no keywords there, there is no SEO (search engine optimization). There is nothing there that would be interesting to them. Potential employer or recruiter that would cause them to reach out to you.
If you stuff the summary area within enormous list of keywords and then have nothing to back it up onto your jobs, employers have no idea when you did this thing.
Employers are all trained by the resume experience and they will believe that job hunters are trying to con them in order to get an interview. When they see lots of summary stuff at the beginning of a resume, and relatively little later on (like the functional resume that tells you everything about a person in their life, their career and where they worked, but it’s all separated from one another). You will learn that this person did some of this stuff, but did 15 years ago. No value.
You have to look at your profile like it is an extended resume. I don’t mean a longer resume. I mean an extension of the resume. You have to have a good quality summary that outlines what you have done and how you went about doing and a few metrics. You want to have your contact information. There email address and phone number. This is true particularly if you are job hunting.
From there, underneath each employer or consulting assignment, depending upon how you have it listed, you want to have supportive information to what you have in the summary. That is also going to help you with your search engine optimization with LinkedIn because LinkedIn will see multiple instances of those keywords and help rank you higher.
[/spp-transcript]
Do you really think employers are trying to help you?
You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much 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 changes 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.
You can order a copy of “Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems” for Kindle for $.99 and receive free Kindle versions of “No BS Resume Advice” and “Interview Preparation.”
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter discusses the stupidest resume mistake people make and how easy it is to fix it.
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I want to talk with you about 1 of those stupid resume mistakes that people make time and time again. It is incredibly frustrating. It is so avoidable. It’s ridiculous that people don’t avoid doing it more often.
Here’s how to fix it. Ready? Spell check your resume.
This should go without saying, but it is not done. You think your resume is perfectly typed. Sometimes you have “fat fingers.” Sometimes, you just don’t know how to spell the word. Just spellcheck your resume.
I saw a statistic recently. One spelling error can cause a resume to to be rejected. Personally, I wouldn’t do that; I would investigate the person more thoroughly but I’m wondering where else this person got sloppy.
I know clients to think the same way that I do. They’re not necessarily going to reject someone, but they will put that person through a bigger meatgrinder of an interview because they want to make sure that sloppiness is not part of the pattern.
After all, this is where you are trying to create a great impression. If you’re consciously trying to do that and you are not spell checking your resume, what’s going to happen when you are not consciously trying to create a great impression?
Again, take a minute. It isn’t hard. All word processing software has.
Spellcheck your resume. It’s a stupid resume mistake. If you don’t.
Last week, there was not a day they went by where I didn’t have 5 to 10 resumes that had spelling errors in them.
By the way, if there is unique language in your field (for example, in information technology or engineering) and our products and services that are unique to your field, visually check the spelling just to make sure. Sometimes in misspelling the term, the misspelling is a correct word but not the word that you want to use.
[/spp-transcript]
Do you really think employers are trying to help you?
You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much 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 changes 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.
You can order a copy of “Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems” for Kindle for $.99 and receive free Kindle versions of “No BS Resume Advice” and “Interview Preparation.”
Things can wrong fast if you make any (or all) of these mistakes.
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Body language is often misunderstood by job hunters who think this is a way to hypnotize people into hiring them for jobs are not qualified for (Follow the pen. You are getting drowsy and drowsier). It doesn’t work that way.
Your behavior is either congruent and emphasizes the points that you are trying to make or in-congruent and, as a result, you turn off people. In one example, I might be speaking very calmly yet flailing my arms. I want to highlight a few of the behaviors you might engage in so that you become aware of them and don’t shoot yourself in the foot and damaged candidacy.
The 1st one is fidgety. Have you ever spoken to some of his just bouncing around, all over the place, and they are just driving you crazy! Fidgeting is a turnoff. Be conscious of when you might do it and stop! If you are feeling nervous, It is better to use your hands to emphasize points, but never block your face.
The next one is what’s called in the business pointing or chopping– – Hard, demonstrative gestures that really wind up exaggerating what you are saying versus emphasizing things with your hands. Never go across your face with your hands under any circumstances. You shouldn’t use your hands to frame your face (There are very few circumstances where someone can get away doing that). Instead, keep your gestures lower if you’re going to use your hands to emphasize points. Don’t do the strong aggressive things to emphasize what you are saying and risk turning people off by feeling threatened.
Your posture needs superior confident. Rather than sitting in a chair hunched over, slumping over in the chair looking bored and disinterested, or the reverse, appearing to cocky, looking as though you don’t have a care in the world sitting with one arm over the back of the chair and treating the person that you speaking with as though they are an idiot, be aware of your posture because both extremes can be costly.
You don’t want to break eye contact and just talk every which way; you always want to appear as though you are maintaining eye contact. In doing so, you can’t look like you are staring. People who appear to be staring are received as though they are crazy. No one wants to hire a crazy person who is staring at them.You know, like the one who never looks like they are going to blink.
If the person is profoundly ugly, talk to just the right or just the left side of their face. Most people will be able to tell that you’re not looking them in the eye.
The last one I’m going to bring up is keeping your arms folded. The way keeping your arms fall that is interpreted is that you are closed or withdrawn, or, if you are overweight it is hard to sit in the chair, I know, there is a tendency to fold arms in front of you. Instead, keep your arms in fern of you or to the sides, framing your body. That will go a long way toward dispelling what could be a misinterpretation of what you are communicating.
Again, being hired will be because you’ve done this, but because you have the skills to do the job and have created trust and rapport with the interviewer that you are the solution to what they are looking for. However, if your behavior is a turnoff, there is no way you’re going to get the job.
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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.
A person continues by writing, “Last week I sent out 8 cover letters, and today I realized instead of “I am writing to apply”, I wrote “I am applying to write”. Eek! How embarrassing. Would this be make or break for you? I haven’t heard back from them yet, but it’s only been a week so I wasn’t worried”
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This is a question I read from someone; I think it’s a useful question because it speaks to the heart of mistakes people make with cover letters.
How fatal is this mistake?
Last week, I sent out 8 cover letters; today, I realized that instead of writing, “I am writing to apply,” I wrote, “I am applying to write.” How embarassing!
Would this be “make or break for you? I haven’t heard back from them but it has only been a week.
So the question is “how fatal is this mistake? As always, the answer is, “It depends.”
Depends on the nature of the job involved. Depends on whether anyone actually read your cover letter. For example, if you set it as an attachment, no one read it. It depends on the nature of the role; if you are applying for a writing job and you wrote that, it can be fatal. If you wrote for most positions, no one really cares.
They might gloss over it because people read resumes and cover letters in 6 seconds or less. In cover letters, it’s often less. If this was your “typical innocuous cover letter” sent as an attachment, no one read it. If this was a “typical innocuous letter” put into the body of an email, someone might have skimmed it quickly to see if there was something relevant in it (if it is like most cover letters, there is nothing relevant in it).
Frankly, I wouldn’t worry about it. What seems more damning is that it has been a week since you applied and no one has contacted you.You said, “only a week;” if you’re an experienced professional, that is usually the “kiss of death.” It would seem that your resume was the bigger problem, not your cover letter. If resumes don’t make the case for your candidacy, you’re not hearing from an employer. Employers only care about whether a resume “vaguely fits” what they are looking for.
So, I’m less concerned with the cover letter; I am more concerned that you haven’t gotten a response. The likelihood is you’re not going hear from them. Not having read your resume or seen the position description, I have no basis to judge why. They may have seen stronger people with tighter matches . . . many different reasons. Don’t worry about the mistake; it’s unlikely anyone noticed.
[/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.
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 a costly Job search mistake too many job hunters make.
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This is one of those difficult conversations for most people to hear because they don’t understand how this affects their success when interviewing.
More and more firms do phone or Skype interviews for initial conversations but eventually, in most situations, you will be invited in for a face to face interview. I saw an article in the Washington Post that wrote about the impact of being out of work on anxiety. When people are out of work looking for jobs or even just looking for jobs and ARE working, they become more anxious because they’re nervous about their interviews and nervous about getting a job and one of the things that happens is that people start to gain weight.
This is an awkward conversation to have but one of the affects of gaining weight is that your clothing doesn’t fit properly and that (this isn’t just for men; it’s for women, too) your shirts or blouses don’t fit properly , your suits don’t fit properly , things just don’t look as well on you.
This is hard advice for me to give because I struggle with my weight and yo yo my weight regularly but, the fact is, you have to watch your weight and, if you’ve noticed yourself putting on a pound or two, you have to do the things necessary to lose that weight before it becomes 5 or 6. After all, things just don’t look as well on you. The space between the buttons is going to start pulling. You won’t be able to button your jacket if you’re a man and present yourself as well. People will notice your trouser button pulling.
And if you don’t think people will notice, you are very very mistaken.
[/spp-transcript]
Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much 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 changes 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.
Connect with me on LinkedIn
You can order a copy of “Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems” for Kindle for $.99 and receive free Kindle versions of “No BS Resume Advice” and “Interview Preparation.”
Don’t forget to give the show 5 stars and a good review in iTunes
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter discusses the top job interview mistake that too many people make and how to avoid it.
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Today I want to talk with you about one of those tragic and completely avoidable job interview mistakes that too many people engage in. I was reminded of it when I asked the question of the job hunter and they went off on this three minute monologue that, maybe, for 10 or 15 seconds had something to do with my question and then they went way off into left field.
I listened for a while, letting them talk on, when he finally came up for air, you know, that pause in the conversation when they finally let someone else speak, I said, “By the way, do you remember my original question?” He thought for a while and eventually answered, “No. I don’t.” We can laugh about it now but how many of you have done that?
What ultimately happens is that you start to think you know the question before the interviewer has asked it because you have been on so many interviews. The problem with you getting a job be be that you don’t interview anywhere near as well as you think you do. This can be one of the big reasons.
You start anticipating the questions and start answering what you think is being asked, go often these long-winded explanations, instead of keeping your answers to 45 seconds, maybe one minute (By the way, if you think that is a short amount of time, try time yourself talking for 45 seconds and see how long that is). You will develop an appreciation for the fact that 45 seconds is a long time.
Your goal is to answer the question. If it is a phone interview, I want you to have your resume out in front of you and write the question down in front of you so that is a reminder that will help you stay on point. When you hear the question, you can even circle a few things on your resume term I do have some talking points you want to make sure to cover.
Answer the question, no more and no less. Don’t go off on long-winded tangents. 45 seconds. Maybe a minute tops. Keep your answer to the point. Otherwise what starts to happen is something that is happened to me – – the interviewer starts to mentally channel surf (thinking about what they would rather be doing; what else they can be doing other than sitting and listening to you; what the next appointment is; who the next call is with). They are no longer listening to you. This could be the very reason why you are failing on your interviews.
You stop listening because you thought you knew what the question was and go off on tangents.
[/spp-transcript]
Do you think employers are trying to help you? You already know you can’t trust recruiters—they tell you as much 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 changes 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.
You can order a copy of “Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems” for Kindle for $.99 and receive free Kindle versions of “No BS Resume Advice” and “Interview Preparation.”
