The Landing Expert

The Interview Is about Understanding the Psychology of the Interviewer

We may not recognize or admit it, but each of us is driven by our own personal psychology--and so is the interviewer. Therefore, the better we understand the decision maker the better we can answer his questions thus improving the chances for getting the job. This sounds logical doesn’t it? So let’s talk about the types of interviewers one may face.

There are a number of systems that are used to label people; DISC is one of them and there are others as well. While working for a major pharmaceutical company, I was introduced to another system, called MBS, Management By Strengths (www.strengths.com). MBS is very simple to use and could prove extremely helpful. As a job candidate, if you can quickly identify what type of person the interviewer is and adapt to his style and needs, you’ve already achieved at least 50 percent success.

MBS recognizes four types of people, and to make the system memorable, the people are identified by colors as follows.

RED stands for directness. Red types focus on the result, on being in control, and on solving problems. They have strong egos and are hard-driving and decisive. Most of the time reds are calm, but occasionally they erupt like volcanoes, letting you have it. And then everything goes back to normal. Being interviewed by a red requires that you be direct and to the point. Red will want you to explain WHAT. Focus on results, and talk about actions.

GREEN stands for extroversion. Here the focus is on people. Green types are outgoing, cheerful, mostly positive, enthusiastic, and pleasant. They like teamwork--working with people. Greens are talkative: Have you had an interview where the interviewer did the lion’s share of the talking? How frustrating! During an interview with a green, you should show enthusiasm, be interactive, and explain WHO. Elaborate on your involvement with teams, act friendly, and be open.

BLUE stands for pace. Blue types value timing, harmony, and cooperation. They seem cool under pressure. They hate being rushed and are therefore excellent planners. Schedules and deadlines are very important to blues. They seem relaxed and easygoing. When interviewing with a blue, show that you’re calm and in control. Explain WHEN. Focus on timing and harmony. Show how you kept everything under control and on time.

YELLOW stands for structure. Yellow types are constantly taking notes. They believe that if it’s in writing, then it’s a fact. In their lives, everything is filed away for future use. In their offices there are papers, files, books everywhere. Yellows are naturally good organizers. They love to be right and hate to be criticized. Therefore they gather all the facts and are very careful and slow in making decisions. Yellows don’t take change well. They appreciate knowing the rules, expectations, and instructions. When interviewing with a yellow, explain WHY. Be as detailed as possible. Focus on doing the right things. Talk about documented facts. Act organized and specific.

So, now that you know the basics about these four types of people, your job is to quickly decide what color your interviewer is. If you’re able to align with the interviewer’s traits, your chances for a successful interview are immensely increased.

Alex Freund is the founder of Landing Expert–Career Coaching. His Web site includes a current and comprehensive list of job search networking groups in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and the city of New York, and the site is visited by thousands of people every month. Landing Expert is a premier career-coaching service with the objective of preparing job seekers for interviews. Alex’s clients are gaining knowledge, receiving marketing material, and acquiring the know-how to beat the competition.

Alex can be reached at:

609-333-8866

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Keywords in Résumé Lead to Interviews

Eighty percent of all submitted résumés (and 100 percent of résumés sent to Fortune 1000 companies) get scanned by software commonly known as an applicant-tracking system (ATS), and such scanned résumés are stored on a server in a digitized format. Humans are seeing your résumé only if it resurfaces based on a query. That’s why most job applicants don’t receive responses from companies after submitting résumés. Therefore, in order to increase your résumé’s chances of being at least viewed by a human--even if it’s not thereafter considered suitable--you have to understand the process and beat them at their own game.

Human resources departments that use ATSs base their queries on keywords they lift from job descriptions or receive verbally from hiring managers. Based on that information, the ATS extracts appropriate résumés from the ones on file. The human resources employee’s query may result in just a few résumés or a vast number. The ATS also scores those résumés and sorts and prioritizes them. Then the employee reviews, say, 20 and submits 5 to be interviewed.

Your job is to ensure that you embed sufficient keywords in your résumé. So, what’s the best way to find those magical keywords? It’s a simple, albeit somewhat tedious, exercise.

1. Search the Internet via job boards such as Monster and The Ladders.com to find 5 to 20 job descriptions of jobs advertised in the field you’re interested in.

2. Cut and paste all of the descriptions one after another into a new Word document.

3. Review the document, resetting in boldface what you consider the keywords throughout.

4. Delete everything except the boldface words.

5. Alphabetize the words, and delete duplicates.

6. Copy your résumé into a new Word document, and repeat steps 3, 4, and 5 on that copy.

The two resulting lists will display which keywords from the descriptions are missing from your résumé. And now comes the creative part: you incorporate the missing keywords into your résumé so it seems seamless and a perfect match for the context in which the words are mentioned in the job descriptions.

By doing this admittedly laborious task, you increase manyfold your chances of being picked out from the crowd.

Alex can be reached at:

609-333-8866

Thursday, May 20, 2010

FREE Resume Tune-Up Workshop at Trinity Church in Princeton on June 7, at 2:00 pm

I am offering again a FREE community service at the Trinity Church of Princeton http://www.trinityprinceton.org/ in the form of a “Resume Tune-up Workshop”. Participants will walk away with knowledge about subjects such as; the resume appearance, how to avoid common resume mistakes, what constitutes an effective resume, in addition to pertinent tips for resume improvements. Who can benefit from such a workshop? It is most recommended for those people who are currently in transition or others who are considering changing jobs.

Where: Trinity Church - 33 Mercer Street Princeton, NJ 08540 (http://www.trinityprinceton.org/directionsAndParking.cfm)

Location: Parish Hall

When: Friday, June 7, 2010

Time: From 2:00 pm to approx. 5:00 pm

What to bring: Your resume, a pad for notes and a positive attitude.

How to sign up: Click on this URL: http://tiny.cc/lk7jv fill out the form and submit

Space is limited to 80 people and only those who pre-registered will be allowed in. First come, first served.

For more details about my background visit www.landingexpert.com , view my LinkedIn Profile and read my blog at http://landingexpert.posterous.com/

Alex

Alex Freund

(609)333-8866

Email: alex@landingexpert.com

Website: www.landingexpert.com

Blog: www.landingexpert.posterous.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alexfreund

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Résumé + Interview = A Job

The formula expressed in the title sounds so simple yet for some is difficult to achieve. So let’s together demystify the two elements for getting a job offer.

The Résumé

Because of the enormously large pool of job applicants nowadays, even a very good résumé may not get singled out when compared with the many outstanding résumés. It’s a competition for sure, and only, say, five résumés might be considered for invitations to face-to-face interviews. So, how does one put together an excellent résumé? That depends: if you have good writing skills, you can draft a résumé and then have some people whose proficiency and judgment you trust review and edit it for you until it becomes excellent. Consult career coaches, human resources professionals, or recruiters. Hopefully, you’ve developed good relationships with such people, who will agree to help by expressing their opinions.

If you are not skilled with language, I suggest you seek a professional résumé writer who has performed work for others and brought them success. This is a good investment, since otherwise, you’re merely spreading around a noncompetitive résumé that brings no action--and you will never find out why. Many people fall into that trap, and they therefore lose time and of course the opportunity to make money. So, how does one know whether one’s résumé is excellent? The answer is very simple: Excellent résumés get action. The rest don’t--or do only very rarely.

The Interview

Congratulations! Your résumé was attractive and intriguing enough to persuade a hiring manager to want a conversation with you in order to explore your candidacy for an opening, competitively with a few others. Now the real competition starts. All of those who have been invited to interview stood out too and could potentially take the job, meaning that they have the skills for it. But the hiring manager has another need to satisfy--and that is whether you fit and will be committed to the company. Ascertaining whether you fit is very much psychological on the part of the hiring manager, who is asking himself whether your future peers would accept you, whether you and he are aligned ideologically, whether his own boss would consider you a good hire, and whether you represent a promising investment. And there are other, similar questions, whose answers can be rather subjective.

The hiring manager’s final area of vital interest has to do with whether you seem committed to the job. He wants to ensure (1) that you have potential for growth within the company, (2) that you won’t move to a competitor if the company goes through some difficult times and someone else is offering you a fraction more compensation, and (3) that you deliberately targeted this company as an employer.

If you can convince the hiring manager that you’re the right choice, if you answer questions properly, and if you project positivity and energy, your chances for getting an offer are good. Good luck on your next job. Feel good about yourself. You deserve it.

Alex can be reached at:

609-333-8866

Sunday, May 9, 2010

There Are Two Types of Americans: Employed and Unemployed

The title of this blog is of course oversimplified but I wanted to emphasize the vast difference between the two sides. As a career coach, I spend a lot of time with people who are not employed, whether they’re my private clients or attendees at the various job-search networking groups I support and frequent.

On one hand, I certainly understand the self-imposed pressure or the family pressure or friends’ pressure on these people. It can be debilitating, devastating, and, as time goes by, more and more depressing. On the other hand, many of those who are currently employed simply don’t understand those on the other side. While the unemployed have to succumb to the reality that the money that used to come in has stopped and while they have to make very painful and unprecedented lifestyle changes, those who are employed and therefore unaffected by the 10 percent rate of unemployment live their lives as well as ever they did. The restaurants in my area are always very busy, and my neighborhood’s Lotus dealer is selling those $75,000 cars; I can tell by the dealer’s parking lot.

So, what’s the solution for those in transition?! NETWORKING is the solution. Having an excellent résumé is a must, of course, but a good résumé is not good enough in today’s competitive marketplace. Most important of all, finding someone to hand carry your résumé to a hiring manager is certainly a huge plus. How do you make that happen? By sliding into the company through networking via, say, LinkedIn, other social media, and networking meetings--and finding the right person to help you.

A recent executive client of mine had been a stellar performer throughout his career but was out of work for five weeks through no fault of his own. Similar to the pattern of all of those in transition, he was down and upset and frustrated about his new situation. I implored him to increase his networking activities, and he did. Last week, I bumped into him at a networking meeting. Later, he told me that while there he was asked by one of the other networkers for a copy of his résumé. The next day, the wife of that other networker called him to invite him to interview. The way it looks now and with a little bit of luck, this job seeker will be extended a job offer. What a wonderful story, hopefully having a happy ending that will prove my point. Networking is the answer.

Alex can be reached at:

609-333-8866

Saturday, May 1, 2010

The Psychology of Finding a Job

To start with, I must make an important disclaimer. I am not a psychologist but a career coach. I don’t find it surprising that there is much in common between the two professions, and I have lots of stories to prove it. If you happen to be in transition, you may want to understand the psychology of the decision makers. It would be useful ammo you could deploy in order to promote yourself in landing a job.

Borders, Barnes & Noble, and similar stores have shelves and shelves of books on the subject of finding a job. I’m going to spare you from having to read several of those books. I want to focus on your need to start accepting change. It’s a known fact that our comfort zone lies within what we know. People exhibit various degrees of resistance to change. But when you’re in transition, you’d better embrace change, because if you resist, the world will go by and you’ll get left behind.

First, accept the fact that your old résumé that you just updated needs much, much more work. It needs to be revamped for today’s contemporary look and for projection of your accomplishments—not a listing of activities that someone in your position was expected to perform. I read résumés every single day, and the reluctance I see on the part of people who stick to the old style and content is a shame. Hiring managers and human resources people are interested in your accomplishments and what you excelled at and not what kept you busy. Recruiters are even more interested, since they have to sell you to hiring managers.

The next area of resistance I see is among those who stick to their own old ways and don’t jump in with both feet by using social media. They simply underestimate to what extent social media is being used by hiring managers, human resources staffers, and outside recruiters. Those hirers consult those social media for several reasons. The most important one is probably that it’s free versus their having to pay significant amounts of money to Monster, CareerBuilder, and others. In addition, social media enable them to cross-check information about you. People spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to make their résumé just right. But not so with information on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Please understand that when companies hire a job candidate, they’re making a big investment. And so, they must do their due diligence, which is similar to what you do when you’re considering a big investment or a decision. A part of that due diligence involves finding out more information about you than what you intended to provide via your résumé. My advice to people seeking employment is to become knowledgeable about and active with social media and at the same time to be careful of what they post in cyberspace. Whatever it is, make sure you’re consistent. A significant discrepancy between your résumé and your cyber persona could be very detrimental.

Alex can be reached at:

609-333-8866