5 Fatal Assumptions of Job Seekers

From StockArt

For some strange rea­son, peo­ple seem to be look­ing for jobs nowa­days. Maybe the eco­nomic inse­cu­rity is forc­ing peo­ple to look for greener pas­tures, or maybe the younger gen­er­a­tion has a cer­tain thresh­old for hold­ing on to jobs, but I’ve heard of sev­eral peo­ple look­ing for work, sub­mit­ting their resume for con­sid­er­a­tion or get­ting job inter­views in other com­pa­nies, and even send­ing their resumes to me for con­sid­er­a­tion in our company.

Here are very help­ful wrong assump­tions that peo­ple have when they look for a job. This is help­ful, not just for the job­seeker, but for the job offerer as well. From Wise­bread. Learn and be a bet­ter jobseeker:

1. Being open to any­thing will increase my changes of land­ing a job.

The search ought to have a focus: you should be tar­get­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties in a cer­tain dis­ci­pline or func­tion; or you should have iden­ti­fied the strengths you’d like to lever­age and then uncov­ered posi­tions that match these strengths. The resume should con­vey that focus; oth­er­wise, you can’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate your­self from other can­di­dates because you’re not really great at any­thing but rather aver­age at many things.

Hir­ing man­agers don’t want to spend train­ing and pay­roll dol­lars on a so-so can­di­date, espe­cially in an envi­ron­ment where money is an extremely lim­ited resource and a more qual­i­fied can­di­date is sure to sur­face soon.

How­ever, it is true that job seek­ers need to be flex­i­ble when pur­su­ing a new posi­tion. Depend­ing on your cur­rent sit­u­a­tion and long-term goals, you should be open to oppor­tu­ni­ties in a new indus­try, a smaller rather than larger com­pany (or vice versa), and even a change of locale.

And, it’s also true that job seek­ers snag jobs that are not per­fectly in sync with their orig­i­nal tar­gets. In these cases, here’s what the hir­ing man­ager is thinking:

• Tap into skills that the job seeker didn’t real­ize were valu­able (for exam­ple, a client seek­ing a sales posi­tion was selected by a state agency for a posi­tion requir­ing client advo­cacy capa­bil­i­ties, which she pos­sessed from years of vol­un­teer­ing in a sim­i­lar role)
• Hire “fresh” tal­ent with no pre­con­ceived notions of how to approach a new mar­ket, reach a dif­fer­ent kind of cus­tomer, etc.
• Recruit peo­ple with a cer­tain back­ground because past, sim­i­lar hires have been successful

2. No one could pos­si­bly pos­sess all of the qual­i­fi­ca­tions required by the employer.

I’ve seen job post­ings that seem to be an impossible-to-get wish list cre­ated by an opti­mistic hir­ing man­ager. For exam­ple, a sourc­ing posi­tion might list the fol­low­ing require­ments (this is a par­tial list of require­ments taken from an online job board posting):

• MBA
• expe­ri­ence in sup­ply chain man­age­ment, pur­chas­ing, and con­tract negotiation
• work­ing knowl­edge of SAP
• pro­fes­sional des­ig­na­tions, such as a CPM (Cer­ti­fied Pur­chas­ing Manager)
• flu­ency in Man­darin Chinese

Stay focused on pur­su­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties that match your qual­i­fi­ca­tions. Build and lever­age your pro­fes­sional net­work. At the same time, con­sider boost­ing your skills through classes at the com­mu­nity col­lege or vol­un­teer experience.

So, while it’s true that the per­fect can­di­date may not appear for many job post­ings (or, more likely the com­pany is required to adver­tise for an open­ing that is prob­a­bly going to be filled by an inter­nal can­di­date who does have these cre­den­tials), going for mul­ti­ple long shots is prob­a­bly not going to increase your chances at win­ning a fan­tas­tic job.

3. I can elab­o­rate dur­ing the inter­view rather than includ­ing valu­able infor­ma­tion on the resume.

The defense of the extremely brief resume is often that hir­ing man­agers won’t read a long one. But there needs to be enough infor­ma­tion to allow the reader to judge whether the can­di­date has 1. min­i­mum qual­i­fi­ca­tions and 2. enough tal­ent and proven expe­ri­ence to con­tribute to the hir­ing orga­ni­za­tion. Oth­er­wise, the sought-after inter­view will never happen.

Even if a resume is two (or even three) pages, a well-designed for­mat that allows quick scan­ning for crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion can get the doc­u­ment placed in the “maybe” pile for fur­ther eval­u­a­tion. Com­pelling accom­plish­ments and deeper-than-average descrip­tions of posi­tion duties may actu­ally aid the screen­ing and selec­tion process, ulti­mately sav­ing time for the hir­ing manager.

Cer­tain top­ics though (for exam­ple, why you left a job after a cou­ple of months) are best dis­cussed in the inter­view rather than detailed on the resume.

4. The peo­ple who will hire me will under­stand my resume.

It’s true that hir­ing man­agers will often have a bet­ter, more com­plete grasp of the indus­try and discipline-specific lingo that’s on your resume than your neigh­bor or even your best friend.

But the resume will most likely be screened by a recruiter or human resources man­ager who may not have exper­tise in your field; and pos­si­bly scru­ti­nized by higher-level staff and poten­tial cowork­ers who may par­tic­i­pate in the selec­tion process. So, using under­stand­able lan­guage is impor­tant to com­mu­ni­cat­ing your qual­i­fi­ca­tions to as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble (see my post on online job boards for ways to iden­tify com­mon terms and key­words). To appeal to a broader audi­ence, men­tion col­lab­o­ra­tive abil­i­ties and team con­tri­bu­tions; and empha­size accom­plish­ments that not only helped your depart­ment improve but also boosted the company’s over­all performance.

5. A hir­ing deci­sion will be made in a rea­son­able time frame.

One of the most com­mon mis­takes is to assume that a hir­ing deci­sion will be made accord­ing to a rea­son­able time­line and there­fore (here’s the dan­ger­ous part), you should wait before pur­su­ing other oppor­tu­ni­ties. If you are hap­pily employed and really want a par­tic­u­lar posi­tion and no other posi­tion, then it is rea­son­able to wait until you learn of the deci­sion. But very often, deci­sions are delayed for long peri­ods of time for rea­sons such as:

• posi­tion hasn’t been offi­cially approved by the cor­po­rate office
• eco­nomic con­di­tions and company’s needs have changed since recruit­ment began
• no great can­di­dates have emerged with inter­est in the position
• hir­ing process requires mul­ti­ple lev­els of approval and rounds of interviewing
• deci­sion mak­ers have been trav­el­ing on busi­ness for a few months

Even when hir­ing man­agers pro­vide a time­line to a can­di­date, they very often don’t adhere to the sched­ule. And, in some cases, they choose a can­di­date but are not able to extend an offer.

Some job seek­ers seem to have a fear of hav­ing to make a dif­fi­cult choice among more than one employer. But the savvy seeker keeps pur­su­ing any and every oppor­tu­nity, and even lever­ages salary nego­ti­a­tions by get­ting mul­ti­ple offers.