In a Job Search? Look for the Pain

Last week we talked about why the black hole is your worst-odds job-search channel. We won’t get a job by pitching resumes into the Black Hole. We’ve got to find ‘our’ hiring manager, and reach out to him or her directly.

If the employer you’re targeting is on the small side, with a few hundred employees or fewer, your target decision-maker may be the head of your function. If the employer is larger, your decision-maker may be a few layers down from that functional VP.

How to Find A Decision-Maker’s Name:

If you’re targeting the VP of your function, the odds are good that you’ll find that person on the company’s website. Piece of cake! If you’re looking for someone a bit further down in the organization, here are four ways to find the name of your very-possibly next boss:
•Conduct a LinkedIn search on the company’s name and your target person’s most likely title.

•Use ZoomInfo.com to find the manager you’re looking for.

•Google the company name plus the title — ‘your’ manager’s name may pop up in a search result.

It’s easy to find a mailing address for your manager, once you’ve got a name. If you check LinkedIn and check with your three-dimensional network and can’t find a conduit person (someone who knows your hiring manager, who’d be willing to make an introduction for you) then your best bet is to send a snail mail letter straight to the decision-maker’s desk.

Now, Spot the Pain
Finding the decision-maker’s name is fairly easy, unless your target organization is a huge company like IBM. After you’ve got a name and a street address, your next job is to spot the pain the employer is facing — that is, the reason for the job opening.
Every job opening springs from some sort of business pain. If there’s no pain, there’s no opening. If things were working perfectly, why would the CFO approve a job opening? Your job is to spot the business pain and show the decision-maker how you’ve surmounted a similar problem in the past.

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Addressing a company scandal during a job interview

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I'm interviewing at a company that underwent major scandals due to its former CEO (i.e. nepotism, fraudulent financial activity, ethics issues). All of these scandals were reported in the press about five years ago. How can I address these issues in the interview? I would (delicately) like to know if the company has bounced back from this turmoil or if it is still working its way out of muddy waters. Since I'm interviewing for a PR position, I feel it would be remiss not to mention these issues. However, I don't want to offend the hiring managers. Any advice would be much appreciated!

Thank you,
Jackson



Dear Jackson,

Since you're a PR person, the hiring manager will expect you to determine on your own whether the company's image has bounced back sufficiently well for you to consider joining them. I'd suggest that you begin by assuming they've recovered brilliantly, and ask them how they did it. For instance:

THEY: So, any other questions, Jackson?
YOU: Yes -- as a PR person with a bit of experience in crisis PR, I'm very interested in your take on the company's journey from the incident five years ago, up to today. Can you share with me how you navigated those waters, and perhaps the most important strategic moves that allowed you to surmount the challenge? I'm sure there is a great story there!

This way, you're complimenting the PR manager. In the unlikely event that s/he says "We just forgot about it and hoped everyone else would, too," you may think twice about the job, but more likely you'll get the inside scoop on how the company managed its way back from PR Hell.

Best of luck! Liz

Explaining a big salary cut

Hi Liz,

I am currently conducting a job search and have run into a problem that I am unsure how to talk through on interviews. Most of my over 18 years experience has been in Purchasing, however my current position is a commissioned sales position for a luxury linen store. I have been at my current position over two years. I made this career change because I thought I wanted to be an interior designer. Most of my clients are interior designers. I thought it would help me decide if that is what I wanted to do. During this two years, I took a few classes in interior design, as well. As you can guess, I don't want to be an interior designer through these experiences. I did take a large paycut to do this. I do have a supportive husband, who agreed with my decision. I am having a hard time having employers understanding how I could have taken a large paycut to do this. I would appreciate any advice on how I can talk through this with confidence. Thanks!

Alana

Dear Alana,

There are two ways to think about a career change like this. One approach is fear-based and the other is confidence-based.

An interviewer may think, "Oh, Alana probably HAD to take that job, why else would she do it?" Very confidently you can say, "After 18 years on the buying side, I wanted to try something new and I knew my reputation and my resume could easily withstand whatever learning - easy or difficult - my first commissioned sales job brought with it."

It is the American Dream, in a sense, to get to a point in your career where you can take risks. That's just what you did!

You can say "I wanted to learn the interior design business, and I wanted to get experience selling. I accomplished both of those things and I'm delighted -- and more clear than ever that my calling is X."

Let people believe that you're independently wealthy! The more confident, breezy and stalwart you are in an interview, the more quickly this issue will fade away. Let's say you get the direct (rude!) question, "How could you afford to take such a large pay cut?"

Your answer will be a pleasant-but-quizzical mini-smile and the reply, "You know, as I made my career-shift plan, finances were not a concern, but the prospect of losing steam in my previous career worried me a bit. Two years later, though, the benefits of logging some time and hundreds of phone calls in the sales arena are clear to me." (Big smile.)

Take care -- Liz

Ask Liz Ryan: Handling a multi-part interview question

Hi Liz,

A few years ago I was severely injured, including sustaining a closed head injury. While people can't tell now by looking at me, some of the mental stuff can still be challenging....including very short term memory, and is exacerbated under pressure. I can analyze issues well but in an an interview if I'm asked 2 or 3 part questions, that can be tough, especially if there's a group of people interviewing me. Not sure about asking for a copy at the beginning of the interview to review as they're asking me the questions. What do you suggest?

Many thanks,

Alana


Dear Alana,

I am so sorry to hear about your injury. Those two- and three-part questions are challenging for anyone. We can't really ask for a list of interview questions at the beginning of the interview; we have to go with the flow. Here are a few suggestions:

* Repeating the question as soon as it's asked helps you frame the question in your mind. You can split a multi-part question into its component parts, and answer each one separately. You can take notes for yourself so that you don't lose track. That might go like this:


S/HE: So Alana, I'd like to hear about why you left Allied Chemical and went to Jones Electronics. Also, I've heard that Allied did a lot of work with Federal Parsnips - were you involved in that?

YOU: I'll start with the Allied-to-Jones move. (looking down at your notepad and making a quick note for yourself.) Then, I'll tell you all about the Federal Parsnips deal. When I'd been at Allied for three years, I learned through a technical writers' group that Jones was beginning a project in..... [and so on]

* Another technique is to look for the point of the question -- the question behind the question, in other words. Very often, a multi-part question points back to one central issue (with luck, a pain point) the interviewer is curious about. If you speak to that issue, you don't have to answer every sub-question in the list. Here's an example of that:


S/HE: We have a huge amount of copywriting to do around here almost every week. We have website copy to write, copy for marketing materials, customized Powerpoints for the sales force and responses to RFPs. So there's a lot of writing, and a lot of version control and keeping track of pricing and feature changes. I'd like to hear about the writing you did at General Vegetable, and if you could tell me about your copy-editing skills, that would be great. One other thing -- have you used Framemaker?

YOU: I think I'm tracking with you -- you've got a huge volume of writing here, and version control is essential, as is accuracy. I ran the marketing library for Consolidated Products, where I wrote or edited anywhere from sixty to 100 marketing pieces per month, purged obsolete materials and coded and filed new ones. In that job, I launched a weekly mini-newsletter that kept our sales and marketing people up to speed on the language we used to describe our services, and people told me that they used that information even in their casual day-to-day interactions with customers.

We used a system called ThoughtSifter there, although I've worked with Framemaker more recently. I'm a fanatic for accuracy, not only on marketing docs but in packaging, sales-training materials and even customer-support protocols -- and I'm just as happy copyediting as I am writing. Can you tell me more about the content-creation process? I'd be very interested in that.


In this example, the interviewee (you!) only answered one of the three parts of the three-part question, but she got across the message that she sees what the employer is up against and has slain the same dragon before.


Best of luck!


Liz

Liz Ryan's virtual job-search workshops cover everything from writing a Human-Voiced Resume to negotiating salary and using LinkedIn. Liz also offers one-on-one career coaching and a free and friendly online community with 25,000 members. Liz is a national workplace expert and a former Fortune 500 HR VP with 50 million readers in the U.S. and abroad. Reach Liz here.
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Keep Your Resume Out of the Black Hole

My friend Stephanie wants to know why I'm so adamant about the Black Hole, the one that swallows resumes the way my dog eats mac and cheese off my seven-year-old's plate when the seven-year-old isn't looking. "I know there are a lot of people applying for these jobs, besides me," she says, "but my resume isn't bad. I know I'm playing the odds, but why not go for it?"

Here's why not. Stephanie doesn't understand how the Black Hole works, and in that respect she's exactly like most job-seekers, who think that the resumes lobbed into the Black Hole get reviewed one-by-one by a careful reader, either an HR person or someone in the hiring department. That happens sometimes, especially in small employers. Most of the time, the process works very differently. Here's a dramatization to give you an idea of the true nature of the Black Hole.

Let's say I'm an HR manager, and I'm sitting at my desk. Down the hall comes a hiring manager -- we'll call him Ted. "Liz," says Ted, "I just got a job requisition approved. You'll see it in your email inbox." "Cool," I say. "What sort of person are you looking for?"

"It's a product manager job," says Ted. "Five to seven years experience."

"Awesome," I say, and I spin around in my chair and check in my inbox. Sure enough, there's Ted's requisition. "Give me a second and I'll put it on Monster," I say. It could be Monster. It could be Craigslist. Whatever it is, I type the thing in there and I hit Submit and the job is posted. Took me a minute and half; it's a clerical thing. "Do you want to check with me on Tuesday?" I ask Ted. "I'll have a bunch of resumes in the queue by then."

Ted heads off to a meeting. I pretty much forget about that job spec out on Monster, crazed as I am with a million other things to think about. Ted shows up on Tuesday and he asks me "How's it going with those resumes for my Product Manager?" I have no idea, so I spin around in my chair again. I log into the company's Monster account and check the Product Manager file. "Eighty-seven resumes," I say. That's light. It could easily be two hundred and twelve.

Ted says "Why don't you phone-screen ten of them and give me the best five." Now look what Ted has given me: a batch process. An assignment. "You got it," I say. I start downloading resumes. Here's the question: how many resumes do I pull down from Monster, to get my ten people to phone-screen?

Ten resumes? Twenty? Some of them may have egregious typos and spelling errors. Maybe I need to go through twenty-five or thirty before I find ten suitable phone-screen-able people. That still leaves fifty-seven resumes up on Monster. I'm not going to look at them. Ted is not going to look at them. No one looks at them. Those people have no chance at the job, at all.

Why would I look at eighty-seven resumes when the first twenty I pull out of the stack are good enough? I wouldn't. In no sense will the best-qualified person who applied for the job, get the job. It'll be the best-qualified person out of the people who are interviewed. The randomness of the process, from a job-seeker's perspective, is crushingly discouraging.

That is why the Black Hole sucks....resumes.

As a job-seeker, you cannot put yourself in the position to have your resume ignored by employer after employer. There has to be a more proactive way to go after a job, and luckily, there is.

You can talk to hiring managers directly.

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Ask Liz: too many jobs on my resume?

Dear Liz,

I am on the job market again after an ill-fated short-term job that I took in March. I had to leave for a variety of reasons but I wasn't fired or laid off. Now, I'm looking again.

I have been steadily employed for 18 years (that's the good news). The bad news is that I've had twenty jobs in eighteen years. Never fired, but I have been laid off a couple of times. I have some gaps where I was looking for work. Is twenty jobs in 18 years something that's going to kill my resume in one second for any hiring manager who looks at it?

Thanks,

Brenda



Dear Brenda,

Don't despair! Yes, twenty jobs in 18 years is too many for most employers to countenance, but you have a few alternatives:

1) You can smash together some of these short-term jobs under the heading "Marketing Project Management Assignments" or "Administrative Projects" or something else. In a section like that, you'd list the start and finish dates (of this chapter of your career, that is - not the start and finish dates for each assignment) and describe the era with something like this:

"From 2002 to 2004 I served as the Marketing person for small Tulsa-area businesses, creating their marketing plans and executing them to build market awareness and client referrals." Your bullets would be items like:

-- "Created the first website for a children's apparel company, building from zero to 800 newsletter subscribers in four months"
-- "Built and managed a not-for-profit sponsorship campaign for an organic cookie maker, generating four local news stories in six months"

So, lumping some of your short-term positions together in an umbrella section of your resume is one option. Of course, you don't need to list all twenty jobs. Most of us don't carry our resume back 18 years. You could drop out some of that history and reduce the optical impact of a bunch of short-term jobs in succession.

Another approach would be to get your next job through a contracting or temp agency. They aren't likely to care about a series of short-term jobs, as long as your references check out. If you can get in with a good agency and stay there, then it won't matter so much whether the actual client assignments are long or short; you'll be able to say on your resume "2009 - 2013, Acme Staffing." So the temp agency itself will be the long-term employer that your resume needs right now.

Cheers,

Liz Ryan


p.s. Check out this week's Career Altitude workshops, here!

Ask Liz: Proof of Income?

Recently I received a job offer that was contingent upon a drug test and credit
check.
It turns out that they now want "proof" of income, and made me send in my w-2
forms from five years back. In addition they asked me to supply a copy of my
school records that showed that I did indeed graduate from College. (A college
degree was not even required for the position)
I feel like my privacy has been invaded, but don't see any other way around
this.
Is it legal?
Sue

-------------------------- LIZ'S REPLY--------------------------

Dear Sue,

It is legal --- and horrendous, and I encourage you to back out of the deal and
walk away. Imagine what it would be like to work for people who have so little
respect for your privacy? Best of luck to you -- Liz