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From Forbes: Most Outrageous Job Interview Mistakes
Calling it win-win makes this a cliché and while I hate using cliché’s, unfortunately this is the best description. Too often in the process of salary negotiation, both sides get too focused on themselves and as a result too rigid. A great deal for company and candidate can easily fall apart by focusing on things that are of little importance.
If the hiring company gives a little is that better than going to the candidate who is second best?
If the candidate gives a little is that better than staying in a job that has no opportunities for career advancement?
Candidate
For the candidate it is important to remember that you only want to negotiate “go” or “no go” items. Too often candidates confuse questions with negotiation points. For example, healthcare is not a negotiable item, so you only need that information to help you make a great decision. Ask for benefits related information in a separate conversation from you salary negotiation. Keep the salary negotiation focused and simple.
Company
Take a second to realize that while this is just business for you, it is very personal for the candidate. You are working to fit the best candidate into you salary range and have internal equity, the candidate really wants to feed their kids.
The Faux Job Offer – Should You Use Fake Counter Offers?
It seems the practice of trying shift momentum in the candidate’s favor by imposing deadlines for the hiring company started long before I got involved in the business. A candidate will create fake counter offers and tell the recruiter they have an offer when they do not.
Ultimately, I have rarely seen this work out well for the candidate and most of the time it backfires. Companies have a hiring process that they go through because it has proven successful for them in the past. Asking them to shorten (disrupt) this process makes them uneasy, there is no good reason to do this unless it is absolutely necessary.
After the deadline has passed, it is amazing how often this other offer did not materialize and they are still interested in my client. Unfortunately the candidate with the faux offer has now lost tremendous credibility.
What we recommend is transparency. If you really have a competing offer, or are expecting one, share everything you know about it with the recruiter. Then we can manage our client accordingly and if you are truly very talented it is likely we can get them to make a decision more quickly than they wanted to. However there is risk they will not adjust the timing of the deal, risk you have no reason to absorb if you are not forced to do so.
There is a lot of bad data out there on how to prepare for an interview, much of which is actually counterproductive to the process. Please DO NOT go out on Google, search for sample interview questions about behavioral interviews or any other type of interview process and waste your time writing out and memorizing answers to these questions. The result is likely to be disaster, first you have no idea what type of questions the interviewer will ask. Even if you hear from someone who has interviewed there before that Company X uses behavioral interview techniques, you do not really know if they do or just the person they interviewed with did. Additionally, no matter what methodology a company uses there are always multiple high ranking employees who can’t be bothered to learn the process and therefore interview the same way they always have. So now your friend told you to prepare for behavioral based questions and you spend hours doing so and you go in and the very first interviewer asks none of the questions you have painstakingly memorized questions for, first you get a little nervous, second your confidence goes downhill and next you are fumbling for answers to even the most basic questions. You just lost the opportunity to work for this company. Worse is you go in and they ask you exactly the questions you are expecting and you answer them all based on the memorization game you played with yourself. You leave the interview feeling great and you never hear from that company again. You have been rejected and they never even bothered to call and let you know, let alone let you know why. In this case the reason you were rejected was your answers sounded rehearsed and therefore fake. Best case scenario is you lacked credibility, worst case scenario they just flat out did not believe you. When you interview you are competing and when you compete with others of similar skills and background, it is individual most prepared who will win. How are you separating yourself from the competition?
The phone interview is inherently challenging as you lose the non-verbal feedback you receive in a face-to-face interview. Ultimately this leads to some common mistakes.
Phone interview Do’s and Don’ts to help you prepare:
Do NOT under any circumstances have the pages of notes you have created about your career in front of you when you interview. You do not want to use the notes as a crutch, you do not want to be fumbling through paper looking for an answer and most of all you do not want to sound like you are reading the answer.
Be in a quiet place where you can focus on nothing but the interview. Door closed.
Do not be doing anything else, watching the news, sending an instant message, checking e-mail. The interviewer deserves your undivided attention. Television off, computer off, cell phone off.
Make the call from a land line. Nothing ruins a phone interview faster than a dropped cell phone call.
Be formal, interviews are naturally a formal process. You need to be at least as formal on the phone as you would be in person. Leave the sarcasm and wit for after you already have the job.
Do not feel the need to fill up every moment of silence with the sound of your voice. Answer the question, fully and completely, demonstrating results / achievements and be quiet. The interviewer is now deciding which question to ask you next, a common mistake at this moment is to get nervous due to the silence and spend the next 30 minutes giving the interviewer a running commentary on your life since age 2. I have never seen this work very well, I have seen candidates do this after I have warned them not to.
Do have 4 or 5 questions prepared for the end of the interview. You should have approximately 3 questions prepared related to the company and the job.
Most importantly, close the interview showing you are results oriented, you are interested in the job and ask for the next step. While you are at it, go ahead and learn what the real job description is:
Phone interview Final Questions: (Separate yourself from the others)
The final two questions I want you to ask after you come up with two or three of your own. The 2 or 3 of your own will be around the job / company / opportunity. These are the standard questions about products, job, scope of responsibility, etc.
The final two questions are important, just like an in person interview, people will remember the beginning and the end. Your goal at this point in time is to be invited in for an in person interview. Do not put the cart before the horse and ask for the job, they do not have enough data on you to award it yet.
The last question you want to ask the interviewer will vary based on who you are interviewing with hiring manager or human resources.
Time is precious in the interview and asking the right questions is as important if not more important than answering questions well. Assume you are competing against other talented professionals and everyone will have strong answers for the interviewer, so far you are only equal to the others. Now is an opportunity to separate you from the pack. You will not receive the same amount of time to ask questions that the interviewer will so let’s make sure the questions you do ask really count.
Hiring Manager:
Second to last question – [FIRST NAME], I really appreciate your time today. The [INSERT JOB TITLE HERE] role is one I am very excited about, it is a great next step for my career. I believe I can really come in and add value to the role and the team. Let’s look out 12 to 18 months and assume I have been able to exceed ALL your expectations. What have we accomplished and how is thecompany better off for the effort?
That is a long question but as I said, you do not have much time to communicate your questions. With this question, you have actually accomplished 4 very important things.
You have shown interest in the specific role, the importance of this cannot be overstated.
You have shown you are team oriented.
You have shown you are results focused.
Most importantly if you listen carefully you are about to understand:
The real job description
How to be successful in your first 12 months.
The real job description is something you need to uncover in the interview process. Chances are the written one was created five years ago by someone other than the hiring manager. Uncovering the true needs of the position is going to help you prepare for your in-person interview.
The first year on any job is your most critical time. Of the people who do not succeed, sometimes it is truly a lack of ability. Most often it is a misalignment of hiring manager’s expectations with what the new employee sees as important. New employee is using the job description the hiring manager received from HR and never actually read.
Last question – [FIRST NAME], this sounds like a great time to be joining [COMPANY NAME]. I am impressed with where the company is going and what I have learned about the team. Do you have any concerns about moving me forward to the next step in the interview process?
With this question you have accomplished three critical items.
You have shown interest in the company. This is equally and important as showing interest in the job and almost always over looked.
You have opened a window for them to express any concerns / objections they might have and therefore an opportunity for you to overcome them. Many times a simple miscommunication derails an interview process. If they have already decided to take you to the next step or to eliminate you from the process they will not mention anything. If they are unsure of their decision they will share a concern with you.
Psychologically it is harder to say no to someone who asks to go to the next step than it is to say no to someone who does not.
AJC.com – Social Media Skills Become Crucial for Job Hunters
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What do the Best CMO Candidates ask in an Interview?
The average CMO tenure is 18 months and the responsibility of this is shared by company and candidate. Ultimately neither side knows how to properly run the interview process. Both sides end up making a decision from far too little data. If you are interviewing for a CMO job and want to make sure you can succeed when you get there you need to prepare properly for the interview. From the interview, the candidate needs to glean the corporation’s vision of marketing. Does this vision actually match the expectations of the job you will do?
Too often, corporations have lofty marketing goals, but are unwilling to give the CMO the latitude to create marketing programs that will make those goals possible. Bottom line is to achieve success in today’s marketplace you must successfully differentiate your brand and products. However most corporations take a risk adverse approach to marketing that leaves them with a lot of me too advertising, you can throw away remarkable amounts of money when your advertising looks like all your competitors. You always have to protect your brand, but you can do that and still have great marketing. Unfortunately it is rare a CEO knows enough about marketing to understand what differentiation is, let alone why it is important. That is not to take anything away from a person who is probably extremely qualified to be the CEO, most CEO’s simply have not spent any significant time during their careers in a marketing role. So they manage the CMO the same way they manage the CFO and it quickly becomes a disaster.
As a candidate for a CMO gig, you need to ask some vital questions? Some of which will seem very basic, but are overlooked most of the time:
1. How do you plan to define success for the new CMO in the first 12 months and the first 3 years?
2. Does [COMPANY NAME] have a marketing strategy to differentiate itself from the competition or are you looking for the CMO to create such a strategy?
3. How does the company’s culture impact its marketing?
4. How would you grade the company’s marketing over the past year?
5. How has marketing impacted the company’s bottom line over the past couple of years?
Properly hiring a CMO is the most important and challenging task any organization has. Unfortunately the CMO candidate often fails before they ever started because they did not find out enough about the opportunity before accepting. CMO will have big deliverables, which can be obtained if they hire the best possible candidate and give him/her the enough latitude to truly differentiate. Too often new CMO’s are expected to do great things while only painting inside the lines.
Showing interest and being committed are integral to interview success. This young man impressed after he made it to the interview with a stab wound in his leg. While I would not recommend trying to repeat his feat on the way to your next interview, ask yourself how committed you are to getting this job and what have you done to make sure you are prepared to win.
Teen stabbed in leg, but makes it to job interview, then hospital – Welland Tribune – Ontario, CA
Today information is accumulating at an amazing rate. With the great opportunities that exist via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and all the strong individual blogs out there, how can you possibly get hold of the best information to allow your company to make more money? Social networking is great but at the end of the day we still have a responsibility to our shareholders. How do you define if the time you spend in the wonderful world of Web 2.0 is productive or not. What is your Web 2.0 strategy? Quite simply, if what you are doing is making you more money than it is a good use of time and if you cannot quantify the value of it then you need to spend your time on something that has impact on profit. The simple question to ask is: Did my time help me acquire a customer, grow my relationship with a customer or reduce my cost? If you cannot answer yes to at least one of these questions, move on to something that does.
Please do not get me wrong, in the fast food world we live in I certainly understand and subscribe to the importance of blogging, article marketing, etc. and the time investment that this takes. Ultimately you need to understand intrinsic value of your online presence and how it will impact your business over time. You also need to understand what others are doing online and make a place for those ideas in your execution of an online marketing program. But I also know how easily you can get caught in the massive amount of information that is coming at you on a daily basis and lose sight of what is you end goal, money.
In addition to constantly asking the three questions outlined above, I recommend the following actions:
1.Stop letting your inbox run your day. On the average day I receive 200 e-mails that require my attention. It is easy to become tied to my inbox, but this does not maximize my productivity and profit. It is easy for me to go to Outlook to look for a piece of information to complete a task and on my way to that data I see I have a new message and get sidetracked from the reason I went to Outlook in the first place. I have now set limits on when I will check my e-mail.
2.Organize the information overflow. Receiving a lot of data at the time you need it least is useless. If you come across something interesting, save it to a folder for later reading. What you will find is if you are not willing to spend the time saving and categorizing the data is was never worth looking at in the first place and would have just gathered dust on the corner of your desk.
At the end of the day if you keep focused on your goals and driving the right results, the decisions are easy. They key is not to lose sight of the goal while data is coming at you at an alarming rate.
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At MarketPro, we consider ourselves your professional partner and we take that honor quite seriously. Time is money, especially in today’s marketplace and we work diligently to understand your company and your unique needs. We don’t send you people we hope might work---we send you qualified, experienced marketing professionals with the skill sets you need and the personality and professionalism you want.
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We pride ourselves on providing opportunities of a lifetime to talented marketing professionals seeking new challenges and broader horizons.
Our relationship with top-ranked corporations and high growth firms provide exceptional positions not openly listed elsewhere. Our clients consistently seek the best and the brightest marketing professionals for contract positions, interim staffing, and contract-to-hire placement in all areas of marketing, communications, creative, and e-commerce. We welcome the opportunity to hear from you regarding your particular expertise, experience, and career goals. Our portfolio of the best talent in America is always open to experienced, talented marketing professionals.
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