Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

The Real Reasons Employers Aren't Responding to Your Resume

If you’ve applied to dozens of jobs but haven’t received any interviews, a warning signal should be going off. There are a number of reasons why employers don’t respond to your resume, and most of them can be easily fixed. Increase your chances that employers will respond to your resume positively by fixing these potential gaffes.

You Submitted It Online

Sending your resume to an organization with no context whatsoever is a surefire way to get lost in the black hole that is the applicant tracking system. You can apply online if it’s mandatory, but try to route your resume through a personal contact in the organization.

You Didn’t Customize It to the Open Position

In today’s tough job market, every resume should be crafted in response to the requested experience and responsibilities listed in the job description. If your resume is off target, it will quickly be put aside. So yes, this means you must have multiple versions of your resume.

For more reasons, head over to the full post at the FlexJobs blog.

 

Should You Ask for Flexibility Upfront?

The first question to address on this topic is—should you bring up work flexibility in an initial job interview?  And in general, the answer is no.

Here’s the thing. Hiring managers want to believe that you’re a candidate who is enthusiastic about the job and willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. They don’t know you from Adam, so immediately broaching the perfectly legitimate question of flexible hours and benefits may portray you as a slacker in some old-school employers’ eyes.

You will also be in a better negotiating position if you bring up work flexibility after they’ve already decided they want to hire you. This means that you don’t discuss the issue until after you have an offer in hand.

But what if it’s a deal-breaker?

Let’s say you don’t want to waste your time with a company that doesn’t give a little in the work flexibility department. In this case, first check out their website to try and find information about flexwork benefits. If the organization is touting flexwork arrangements as a reason it’s a great place to work, then you may be in luck.

For the rest of my advice, have a look at the full post on the FlexJobs blog.

Why Employers Don't Respond to Your Resume

f you’ve applied to dozens of jobs but haven’t received any interviews, a warning signal should be going off. There are a number of reasons why employers don’t respond to your resume, and most of them can be easily fixed. Increase your chances that employers will respond to your resume positively by fixing these potential gaffes.

You Submitted It Online Sending your resume to an organization with no context whatsoever is a surefire way to get lost in the black hole that is the applicant tracking system. You can apply online if it’s mandatory, but try to route your resume through a personal contact in the organization.

You Didn’t Customize It to the Open Position

In today’s tough job market, every resume should be crafted in response to the requested experience and responsibilities listed in the job description. If your resume is off target, it will quickly be put aside. So yes, this means you must have multiple versions of your resume.

You Wasted Space and Attention

The average resume gets read in about 30 seconds, and in that time, you have to turn them on rather than turn them off. An ultra-specific objective will pigeonhole you into a particular position when the hiring manager might consider you for another opening. Adding too much information about your volunteer work and hobbies looks amateurish, as does saying that “references are available upon request.” Believe me, if they want references, they’ll ask for them.

For more, please visit the full post over at the FlexJobs blog.

Key Signs You're About to Hire the Wrong Person

Turnover costs are steep. Just ask John Bishop, founder of employee assessment company Accent on Success. Bishop says that one of his clients, a St. Louis-based photocopier company, figured its first-year cost to train a new copier repair person is in excess of $63,000. That figure includes advertising for the position, overtime for other repair people to cover the area until a new person can be hired, then salary, training costs, travel, and road time with a supervisor.

A study done by Rutgers University Graduate School of Business estimated that the turnover cost for a non-professional position is one and a half times that of the person’s annual salary, while the turnover cost for a professional position is as much as two times that person’s salary.

Doesn’t this kind of financial impact make you want to take your hiring process a little more seriously?

Hiring For The Long Haul

Productive hiring is about more than just making sure the candidate has the right skills and experience for the open position. They also have to be able to work well in and contribute meaningfully to the culture you've established for your company. If the candidate is a square peg in a round hole, they aren't going to last long. So you should do everything possible to assess that the person you're planning to hire is willing and able to successfully navigate your environment—before you officially bring them on board.

Here are signs that the job candidate you're thinking about hiring might not be the best fit for your business:

1. They don’t know much about your organization. Candidates who come in for their interview without having done any homework on your organization aren't likely to make an educated decision as to whether they're a good match for you. Savvy candidates will use the interview as an opportunity to probe you further about your business's culture based on their preliminary research.

2. Your leadership style won’t meet their expectations. Perhaps you’ve asked candidates to share the qualities of their ideal management team, and they describe a manager with an open-door policy and a transparent communication style. You know that your executive team’s close-to-the-vest, hierarchical approach will not fly with them. Save yourself some heartache either by being upfront about the potential disconnect or by passing on the hire altogether.

For lots more signs, have a look at the full piece at the AMEX Open Forum.

The 4 People You Must Have On Your Team

An effective team always has a mix of personalities, all with different strengths and talents. Ideally, the types work together seamlessly, each taking over where another leaves off.

In the blog series by Software Advice for the New Talent Times, Holly Regan and James Maynard describe the four types that must compose every productive team. They are The Giver, The Champ, the Matrix Thinker, and the Savant. Let’s have a look at what the types are like and how leaders should best leverage them.

The Matrix Thinker

Matrix Thinkers are your quintessential creative types. They don’t just think outside the box, they think about where the box came from, why it’s there and how it could be designed better. Matrix Thinkers are constantly absorbing information from everything around them; as a result, they often make connections among seemingly unrelated concepts. Frequently, this leads them to creative and revolutionary ideas, but sometimes, it just confuses everyone.

How to Work with Them

Don’t overload them with input. Matrix Thinkers will take in everything you give out to them, so be careful not to give them too much lest they become overwhelmed. While highly-functioning Matrix Thinkers can effectively juggle multiple projects, if you’re constantly providing changes and updates to all of them, they may fail to complete anything.

Make sure they know what’s expected of them. Since Matrix Thinkers are already dealing with so much outside noise from their environment, they may struggle with additional ambiguity in the form of undefined expectations or authority. They would rather have full control over a few projects than partial control over many, so make sure you clearly define roles, rules and expectations.

Don’t penalize them for disorganization. You may need to relax your standards for organization somewhat when you have Matrix Thinkers on your staff, as long as they aren’t interfering with their colleagues’ workspaces. While their desk may look chaotic, there is likely a unique system behind it.

For the rest of the types, check out the full post at Intuit's Fast Track blog.

How Do You Get Past No?

In their famous book, Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher and William Ury provided a negotiation strategy that has become standard for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in personal and professional conflicts.  The model is based on five propositions, including:

• “Separate the people from the problem.”
• “Focus on interests, not positions.”
• “Invent options for mutual gain.”
• “Insist on using objective criteria.”
• “Know your BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement)”

I learned about the BATNA in particular years ago and have used it on several occasions.  BATNA is the course of action that will be taken by a party if the current negotiations fail and an agreement cannot be reached.  A party should generally not accept a worse resolution than its BATNA.  According to Fisher and Ury, however, care should be taken to ensure that deals are accurately valued, taking into account relationship value, time value of money, and likelihood that the other party will live up to their side of the bargain.

While Fisher and Ury’s strategy was generally accepted as being revolutionary, there were critics who responded to it with challenges such as “What if the other party refuses to work with you?” and “What if they try to trick you into an agreement?”  Ury addressed these questions in a sequel called Getting Past No.  This second book takes the original model to a new level, detailing the process of negotiating through obstacles and obtaining win-win agreements with people who are initially resistant to such approaches.  Ury’s five steps to an effective breakthrough negotiation are:

Go to the balcony

Don’t react to provocations and let your emotions get the best of you.  Step away from the scene, calm down, and carefully plan your response.  Do not respond automatically, because most automatic responses are negative and further escalate the situation.

Step to their side

Listening carefully, acknowledging and even agreeing whenever you can, helps the other person feel heard and tends to disarm hostility.

Don’t reject, reframe

To change the game, change the frame.  If you take whatever is said and cast it as an attempt to deal with the issues, you’ll get further than if you simply reject it out of hand.  Ask questions like: “Why is this add-on important to you?” or “What if another member of our team could participate?”

For the rest of Fisher and Ury's steps, check out my full post on Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Do You Talk At People or With People?

Bill Boorman kindly invited me to speak at his TruLondon human resources conference here in London.  I use the word “speak” loosely because Bill expressly told me not to bring a presentation.  The Tru events are known for their informal structure, and I was to bring nothing except 5 questions about my topic that I could pose to the group.

This approach made a lot of sense.  After all, all Tru conference participants are HR executives who are experts in their own right.  What’s more valuable – for me to stand in front of them for an hour doing a one-way knowledge dump, or for all of us to interactively share what we know back and forth, generating new ideas and building on established ones?

Of course, it does put the audience on the spot.  No longer can they show up to an event and expect to passively sit with their minds somewhere else.  They will need to think, and they will need to be engaged.  And even if it wasn’t exactly what they expected, I am willing to bet that nine times out of ten, they will be more satisfied afterwards.

Is Your Communication a One-Man Show?

Whether or not you are in a role in which you routinely make remarks to a group, it’s worth considering if you could talk more with people than at them.  You see, even in a one-to-one conversation, talking at someone is less effective.  Your mind is made up as to the message you want to get across, and you aren’t thinking about how that message is being received or whether your remarks are appropriately customized for your audience.  You may not be paying attention to non-verbal cues or reading between the lines, and you may not be allowing the person a chance to respond and provide feedback.

Loosening Your Grip on the Reins

On the other hand, when you talk with a group, your agenda is more flexible.  You are working with your audience to have a discussion that benefits all involved.  By providing some baseline information that establishes context for the conversation and then asking open-ended questions that draw your audience out, you are partnering with others to shape the direction of the interaction.  And this can have unexpectedly positive results.  You might, for example, come away with data that helps you up your game – data that you never would have thought to seek out on your own.

For other suggestions, have a look at my full post over at Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Should You Relocate for a Job?

In a job market that still leaves something to be desired, the question on many professionals’ minds is, “should I relocate?”  Whether your current organization offers you a transfer that sounds too good to pass up or you receive an offer from an out-of-state (or out-of-country) firm that comes just as you were starting to get desperate, relocation is an issue that must be taken seriously – especially if you have a family that will be uprooted with you.

Of course, developing a list of pros and cons is a good move when making any major decision, but careful consideration of these five questions will also aid in your thought process.

Would you move there anyway?

If this job didn’t exist, is the area in question a place you’d ever want to go?  Think about what your regular daily routine will be like in the new location.  Do the pace of life and the amenities appeal to you?   How about the people, the culture, the weather, and the traffic?  Remember that a job is only one aspect of your life, and even work that you enjoy won’t be enough to overcome the distress of being stuck in a locale that’s not a good fit.

How will the move impact your family?

Relocations are easiest when you’re at a more flexible stage of life.  Once you have a family, however, you have to think about what your spouse will do in the new city.  Will he or she be able to get a good job too?  Is this area somewhere you can envision raising your children, complete with safe play areas and good schools?  Does the relocation involve moving away from extended family and friends who make life meaningful?

For more suggestions, have a look at the full post at Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Are You Selling Yourself as Well as You Could?

For several years, I’ve been recommending that people focus on being able to succinctly and effectively highlight their accomplishments because others (i.e. recruiters, managers, partners) will judge them mostly based on their past track record of success.

It turns out that’s not exactly the case.

What You Could Do is Better Than What You Have Done

According to Heidi Grant Harvorson at the Harvard Business Review, when we are deciding who to hire, promote, or do business with, it turns out that we don’t like the Big Thing nearly as much as we like the Next Big Thing. We have a bias — one that operates below our conscious awareness — leading us to prefer the potential for greatness over someone who has already achieved it.

In a series of studies conducted by Stanford’s Zakary Tormala and Jayson Jia, and Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton, it is clear that human beings demonstrate an unconscious preference for potential over actual success.

In an experiment related to the workplace, hiring managers evaluated two equally impressive candidates who varied on one factor:  one had two years of relevant experience who scored highly on a test of leadership achievement, and the other had no relevant experience but scored highly on a test of leadership potential.  Interestingly, the evaluators believed the candidate with leadership potential would be more successful at the new company than the candidate with a proven record of leadership ability. The researchers documented this preference in laboratory and field experiments, using targets ranging from athletes to comedians to graduate school applicants and measures ranging from salary allocations to online ad clicks to admission decisions.

For more, check out the full post on Intuit's Fast Track blog.

In the Workplace, Appearance Still Counts for A Lot

In June of 2012, the University of Virginia announced the resignation of its president, Teresa Sullivan.  Faculty members received an e-mail indicating that the dismissal was due to a “philosophical difference of opinion” with the institution’s governing board.  Sullivan had been with the university just two years, and in the opinion of some, had been let go for little or no reason.

College presidents are chief executives too

In the New York Times Magazine, Sullivan’s allies suggested that she didn’t fit the governing board’s image of a chief executive.  Sullivan’s fashion sense, which was typically academic, had apparently offended the higher-ups.  During Sullivan’s performance review, she received comments that her dress was too informal. “I don’t know what the unprofessional dress was,” Sullivan told the Times. “I do live here at the university, so when I’m working out or doing something else here, people will see me.”

Would the same criticism be given to a man? Here what I think over at Intuit's Fast Track blog.