Advice to someone who is looking for a dream job
Do not settle for just getting a job. Do not let rejection put a dent in your self-confidence. Make the most of job interviews and increase the chances of adding value to your life.
Digital standards are melting down barriers of organizations. Business models are changing, shaking the employer-employee relationship to its foundation. Automation, work from home, increase rotation, are doing the rest.
Whether you are a fresh graduate or a seasoned professional, the odds and hurdles to find the right job are the same. You will need to go through a complicated process that will culminate in a couple of interviews. Your future life-balance will depend on them.
For a specific position, in the matter of a couple of weeks, a company might receive over 200 applications. 50% of these applications would not move to the next stage: applicants will receive a generic email with the usual I regret formula. The remaining 100 applicants will go through a screening call: a junior interviewer will ask questions and thick some boxes as their internal template. The cut here might be even higher: only 1 over 4 candidates will get an assignment to an interviewer, so only 25 will continue the race. Of them, only 5 will be considered worth the time of an interview, and only 1 will get an offer.
1 over 200 applicants makes the hire!
This complicated process creates a competition bias, leaving the feeling that
signing the offer would make you a winner! Is that the case?
To answer that, take a look around! No matters how long you have been working, sadly, less than 50% of your colleagues, bosses, friends feel that they are in good jobs, according to statistics.
Where is the catch?
The hurdles of getting an offer tell nothing about the gratification you will get by spending 40 50 hours per week. What you need is one principle, two simple techniques, and three simple rules to follow.
“Flexibility makes you happy”. A digital mantra
Technologies change and will keep changing. Cutting-edge ones change even quicker. With shorter product life cycles, specialists remain caged by the knowledge of skills without even maturing enough experience.
In such a changing environment, motivation to learn, networking skills make a difference more than a specific technical background. Yes, Digital transformation requires high-performance teams, and getting specialized can payback very well during the hype: but it will not last an entire carrier.
Defining problems by catching differences will be the most hunted skill (Artificial Intelligence will take ownership to solve them). To enable that, it requires a deep understanding of at least one of the disciplines constituting modern organizations. Ten thousand hours of knowledge on a specific topic will never expire: you need to know how to leverage it.
Let us face it. From the start (hiring), carriers have little to do with meritocracy. Few organizations (usual boutiques) appreciates workers for what they give or will give back. In large organizations, hiring and appraisals remain locked up to company performance, quarterly results, management judging: that is it. Generally, managers do not train to understand and to value strategic outcomes that go beyond immediate results.
The reason? Stakeholders do not measure that. In the last twenty years, adoption and conversion have measured business success in all fields, pushing organizations toward unknown financial directions. Running after a quarter-to-quarter growth, they clash periodically against negative business cycles. Their reaction has complicated the recruiting process, polarizing company cultures, and creating myths by marketing CEO rock stars to cover inadequate recruiting strategies.
Now digital standards are melting down barriers of organizations. Business models are changing, shaking the employer-employee relationship to its foundation. Automation, work from home, increase rotation, are doing the rest.
The number of interviews we will go through will increase, one more reason to debunk the process and maximize your odds to add value to your life, not just to get a job.
Increasing your odds to get an interview
Once a recruiter told me: “When I open a new position, I pile all the CVs up and then throw in the bin half of them. Dealing with lucky people increases my chance of success.”
I trust there are more professional ways to deal with large numbers of applications sent against a single position. Nevertheless, it is a fact that CVs go through screening, and your odds will depend on the generic fit to the job profile.
Read the job description carefully, and adjust your curriculum.
Go over the jargon, the simple cut and paste with no real touch with the specific needs. Read between the lines. You can retrieve how the organization operates (onsite, offshore), the kind of culture (formal-informal), the management style (blue, red) the business model (closed, open). These are aspects to underline in your CV and to be considered. They make the position appealing or not, salary apart.
One more point: who will screen your profile will not have specific knowledge to evaluate your expertise. They will mostly look for consistency among the CVs, and they will limit themselves to staring and comparing references and gaps. Two things to remember:
Reference is recruiter relief: external references will count more (self-publishing in LinkedIn is worth less than an article on the media).
Gaps equal inconsistency: everything you can explain adding continuity in time, role, and experience will increase confidence and will push the CV forward. Your education took longer than expected? It is worth additional experience done in parallel. Have you stayed in a role for less than 2 years? Worth to add some explanation.
What will make you stand out needs still be comparable according to standards, making you pass the admin side, the recruiting agency, and get you shortlisted.
A simple principle: a negotiation, not a competition
A job interview is not a competition. It has nothing to do with conflict resolution:
A job interview is about problem-solving. It is a negotiation between a candidate and interviewer, who have both the objective of gaining the most and useful understanding of the matching between the role and the candidate.
I am a space aeronautic engineer by background, and I have worked with cutting-edge technologies for my entire carrier. I changed several companies, bosses, sectors. I have recruited candidates internally or from the market. I have stuffed projects and programs; once built an entire practice, chosen partners to run large transformation deals; operationalized joint-venture by scouring for change agents.
I have always kept a look at literature in this field, finding less useful interviewing templates or articles on the right body language or dress code for an interview.
Sitting on both sides of the table, I found a higher utility in understanding negotiation principles explained by very reputed professors like Margeret a. Naile and Deepak Malhotra. Reading any of their books will radically change your job interview experience.
Position, candidate, and context are factors to adapt each time the best approach and style to keep in the interview. That is true for both interviewer and candidate!
If one of the two parties offsets the ability to say no, the odds are that the overall transaction will bring the required value. We tend to forget that every somewhat unfavorable deal we have gotten (including jobs), there was a moment when we have agreed on it.
You always gain in the long term by providing sincere answers, as explaining a no can lead to better results and a more trustful relationship than a reluctant yes.
Two techniques: STARS in the SKY to reach your dreams
In writing your CV or during the interview, these two techniques will help keep focus:
Define the SKY and append your STARs
SKY stands for Setting, Knowledge, and Yields. You need to keep on the radar these three key elements making sure that your CV, your answers, or your questions provide a consistent persona, image, and reputation:
Setting collates all aspects representing your motivation: roles played, experience gained, required achievement, and aspirations need to combine smoothly.
The knowledge needs to offer a coherent Leitmotif to all your experiences and your past and current roles. Which elements have been common in your carrier? What aspect of this job correlates to your study or previous experience? What do you want to learn next, and why?
Yields are your asks: Salary, job title, or any other currency will become part of the proposal you aim to receive (from leave days to tuition). They need to be bundled together and ranked in terms of priorities. They will constitute the key ingredients of the negotiation.
STAR stands for Situation, Tasks, Actions, Results.
Situation: Start your answer by providing a clear picture emphasizing its complexities, risks, and impact. Your narrative needs to be compelling and be right on the spot, concise, focused. With the result always in mind, take the opportunity to show your thinking process.
Tasks: now spend a few words to describe your responsibilities in that particular situation, including position, mandate, and personal objectives. Here the opportunity is to showcase your pragmatic understanding of your role.
Actions: After depicting the problem and the role, this is your chance to highlight what you did, with emphasis on the sequence, concisely by clearly explaining the course and mentioning the actors involved.
Results: Closing up, you need to quantify and to qualify the outcome of your actions, focusing on why it mattered.
Why STARs?
Put yourself in their shoes. No matter the role (professional recruiter, HR department, or a functional manager) will perform the interview between several other things, talking to several candidates on the same day.
The best way to note down the outcome while asking questions is to put a STAR on the CV and then compare candidates by counting the STARs.
Three suggestions to find your dream job
Once you get an offer, it will be up to you to accept it or not. Before, during, and after the interview, you will get a large amount of information, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle showing a picture of you if you take that job.
Here there are three more suggestions to keep in mind while reviewing them:
#1- From A to B, the shorter path is a straight line: belief in your dreams
At the beginning of my career, my mentor once told me: “you own your career; if you let your managers choose for you, you will never do what you like, but what they need”. Yes, we need a job. Yes, all of us have duties. You need to know your market value, figure out who you are and what you want to do with 40 hours a week for around 30 years.
Don’t forget: nobody wants to follow the crowd, but there is a crowd, and everybody seems to be in it. Each step you make, including the next one, matters to stand out.
Keep this in mind before even apply for a new job. Use your network and ask questions to understand how you fit the organization. If there are too many things you can live with, well, probably that’s not your dream job, even if it looks like it.
#2 — Understand the person on the other side of the table
Composing your STAR answers, you need to resonate well with the interviewer. In the first 60 seconds, if not already in the interview preparation, you should try to assess key personality traits, quickly adjusting your style around that. Again, the objective is to have the cleanest communication possible to evaluate how you match the job:
Risk tolerant vs. Risk Averse
This trait can indicate the time you will have to fit a specific role. Risk-averse selectors will look for a fit, for answers that can lead to a tick in the box, candidates that provide an operational more than strategic statements. On the opposite side, risk-tolerant selectors will be interested in the reasoning behind the specific decision.
Trusting vs. Skeptical
This trait should determine the level of details to provide during the interview. Trusting interviewers will evaluate the experience in qualitative terms. Fascinated by the context, they ask questions on what-if scenarios to understand the candidate’s maturity. Skeptical interviewers dig more on quantitative aspects, catching inconsistencies in numbers, dates, and references.
Optimistic vs. Pragmatic
It couples with the base knowledge of the interviewer. The optimistic interviewer talks about the idea, qualitative aspects of the role.
The pragmatic one moves the discussion around a set of facts. For the first, it is more a matter of will; the latter has a need, usually immediate, to staff.
#3 Make them like you, believe in you, back up you internally
It is a negotiation, a game that needs to end with a win-win, you get hired or not. As companies don’t negotiate, but people do, whoever is your interlocutor (from HR to your potential future boss) needs to like you, believe in you, and fight on your behalf to accommodate your asks. Keep always the communication open and look together for alternatives.
Keep the communication open and look together for alternatives, showing flexibility, and explaining your priorities.
Summing up
We live in tough times, and COVID has made it worst. It does not matter if you are approaching your first job quest or you need to reposition yourself. You are taking part in an unprecedented “war for talents”, and you are not always in control. Said so, you should keep very clear in mind what you are betting, not only what you can gain: 40 -50 hours per week of your time, your morning and evening mood will pair up with the salary and benefit, so more than a competition, better prepare yourself for a negotiation!
Remember: you are not looking for a job. You want to be happy while working!
Good Luck!
My articles on Innovation
Three forces that shape innovation beyond conflict and change
The three essential traits of successful innovators
Innovation in Nature: a life history strategy approach to change your business
My articles on Wellcare
The birth of “Wellcare”: a long term digital strategy for Pharma and Insurance organizations
Wellcare is shaping around online pharmacy competition: this is how!
