Tony Beshara

There are 325 million people in the United States. 95 million of them are not in the labor force. 88 million of these people don’t want a job…38 million of these say they are retired, 16 million are ill or disabled, 16 million say they are students, 18 million have simply dropped out of the work force. The number of officially unemployed people who say they’re actually looking for a job is 7.1 million. Consider:

• There are more welfare recipients and full-time workers in the United States
• One in seven people in the United States receive food stamps
• One in 20 Americans receive disability
• 12% of all prime aged men (25 years old to 54 years old) are not looking for a job
• Between 2000 and late 2007 per capita GDP growth averaged less than 1.5% per year
• The adult work rate in America is barely above at its lowest level in 30 years
• For every 1 male between the ages of 25 and 54 working there are 3 that are not

And some of the most prominent reasons for this malaise:

Entitlements pay more than the job. Between unemployment insurance, disability insurance and food stamps, it’s more economical to collect entitlements than it is to find a job. One study reported that a family of four, collecting all the benefits for which they are entitled could earn his much is $65,000 per annum. There are more people participating in at least one of the 15 food programs offered by the Department of Agriculture and there are fully employed in the United States.

The affordable care act has a perverse twist affecting the labor market. Means tested subsidies phase out as incomes rise. Some people will choose to stay poor or accept a lesser job and they might be capable of or get out of the workforce completely to keep insurance. Changes to the affordable care act that President Trump has recently made may, thankfully, change this.

There’s also an “attitude” of entitlement that there “ought to be a job for anyone who wants one and they are to be easy to get.” This attitude causes people to think that the job should come to them. Most people think that “looking for a job” is simply emailing resumes. Most people don’t really work very hard at getting a job.

People don’t want to take a pay cut. Salaries have still never reached levels that they were in 2007 and 2008. Most people have an idea that their earnings should increase every year. Even after long stints of unemployment these people will claim, “I really don’t want to take a step back moneywise.” Once they pass up one or two opportunities, they rarely come to their senses. Instead of taking any good salary they can get a think, “well I passed up to opportunities with less money than I was making so I should stick to my guns and wait for something better.” And something better doesn’t come along for even years.

People don’t like a company’s reputation. Many surveys find that Americans would not take a job with a company that had a bad reputation even if they were unemployed. This is crazy! These same people state that they would change their mind if they receive a 50% plus increase in their previous pay. (It appears that a bad reputation is relative to the money that people are getting paid…go figure!)

I’m not sure I really know what a “bad reputation” means. Unless a firm operates in illegal or immoral business job with the company who has less than a stellar “reputation” is better than no job. And some of these reputations are interpreted from comments made on Glassdoor. It’s despicable that people would believe what might be written anonymously. I don’t have a problem with anything anybody might say about any company as long as they put their name on it. But for people to make decisions about anonymous comments is absurd.

Those in motion tend to stay in motion. Those at rest tend to stay at rest. The longer people go out of work the easier it is to stay out of work. It’s just that simple. This is one of the reasons that taking “massive action” to get a job is so important.

Most people submit resumes online and when they don’t get an answer they give up. These people don’t really know what to do to get a job. The odds of getting a job by sending a resume are 1 in 375 to 400. When you ask people what they’re doing to get a job beyond sending a resume their description is very sketchy. The key is to develop a systematic approach to finding a job. It takes a lot of work! A whole lot of work!

Even when their resume might be perfect for the job, the people who receive it, most of the time, the human resources department is understaffed and overwhelmed. There are 200 resumes submitted for every job and I venture to guess that less than half of them even get scanned let alone read.

The cost of childcare is staggering. In some states cost of childcare is the greatest expense that a family experiences, outweighing food and housing. The largest demographic hit is single mothers. The national Institute of health says that for low income single mothers with young children, child care challenges can be is significant barrier to employment.

The commute is too long. In a recent poll 75% of 584 people said they turned down a job because it was “too long of a commute.”

Maintaining their place in the benefits system is a full-time job. Government benefit programs have strict rules about those receiving benefits. Many people spend the majority of their time staying within those parameters. They know that if the rules are broken they could lose their aid. Government offices are packed every day all day long in this country. The Department of Labor, the Social Security Administration, admission offices for public hospitals in most programs like this have hours upon hours of wait time. The required appointments and the filling out of paperwork, qualifying and requalifying for unemployment, Social Security insurance, disability, food assistance programs are absolutely daunting. It’s very hard to look for a job when a person is faced with these issues. There’s really not enough time in the day.

People out of work for a long period of time feel stigmatized. If a candidate has been out of work for six months or more, they feel marginalized. The truth is, they are. Employers will often pass any candidate up who has been out of work for a long period of time. There are just too many other candidates to choose from. A candidate out of work that long appears to be a risk. And that is just one less risk they might have to deal with in considering another candidate who appears to be either employed or recently unemployed.

There are very few simple answers to all of the reasons that so many people are out of work. Repealing or even streamlining entitlements would be a great start. Teaching people all of the activities that it takes to find a job would be another step in the right direction. Holding people accountable for taking massive action with those activities would be another valuable tool. Many of these solutions will be difficult and take a long time to institute.

i got an interview for one of my candidates that i have known for a number of years…he is very picky and the kind of job he needs is very hard to find..

when i told him about the interiew, he started giving me this stuff about..”well, i know them…i wouldn’t work there…they know me…i don’t want to go…i don’t think they can afford me..it doesn’t sound right” blah..blah..blah…

i threatened him that if he didn’t go, i wouldn’t get him any more interviews…i shared with him that he is a pain in the butt and that he needs to go on any interview he can, because he is hard to place and kind of people that would hire him are very hard to find…

he went…

he starts work for these guys monday…$155,000 salary plus commission that will put him at $300,000 the first year… a $20,000 HIGHER base than he was making..

LESSON: ..go on every interview you can get…you really don’t know “them” like you think you do…what a job “sounds” like has nothing to do with reality… don’t make a $155,000 mistake

This is the psychological term and condition that causes a person to believe that they are at less of a risk of experiencing a bad outcome than most, and more likely to believe that they are luckier than most to have a positive outcome. This bias shows up in all kinds of issues. For instance, most smokers believe they are a lot less likely to get cancer from smoking than other smokers. The vast majority of drivers think that they are in the top 20% of quality drivers. Most people think they’re less likely to be crime victims than they really are.

This is relevant to job seekers because 90%  of the job seekers I have interviewed since 1973…over 26,000 of them…and 60% of them were employed…all thought it was gonna be a lot easier to find a job than it was and is… and all began their job search thinking and saying, “This is gonna be easy…never had a problem before…everyone needs a great employee like me…look at all of the promotions I have had…look how great my track record has been…my neighbor (cousin, brother, etc.) got a job real easily, and he is a jerk, so this will be easy…” then they often follow it up with, “…so I took a few weeks…months…off  ’cause I hadn’t had a real vacation in a while…”

Then they start looking for a job or doing some minor efforts toward that and find out that the market is very difficult, more difficult than they even imagined. Reality sets in and they realized that they should have started a full-court press in looking for a job two or three months earlier.

Another form of this optimism bias has to do with people’s attitude towards interviewing. I hear   this a number of times every week, “Tony, just get me in front of them, I’ll nail the interview… I’m really good at it.” Anytime a candidate tells me that, I’m worried. Interviewing is a difficult thing to do. Very few people do it well naturally without a lot of practice. After a few big time rejections, humility and reality normally set in.

Optimism bias in the job search can manifest itself in many other ways and all of them are treacherous to the job seeker. The best way to avoid optimism bias is to approach looking for a job with absolutely no expectations, a slight bit of paranoia and the realization that it is going to be hard and the job seeker has to start working at their job search immediately. I’ve seen six recessions come and go and I assure you the job market is never quite the same every time. A job seeker can’t confuse the last time he or she changed jobs with today’s market.

Rather than being “optimistic,” I suggest a job seeker should be “hopeful” and then work like hell by working a systematic process like I teach.

At least three or four times a week our candidates inform us that their non-compete agreement “doesn’t mean anything in Texas” or “It’s not enforceable in Texas”, etc. I have no idea where people come up with these ideas, but they are absolutely wrong. Non-compete agreements are enforceable in Texas (and in most states) and don’t let anybody ever kid you and please don’t believe them. I’m going to address some of the things that we mostly run into regarding non-compete agreements. Realize, though that the best legal advice about non-compete agreements should come from quality attorneys. Two of the most prominent labor attorneys in the city happen to be guys that have contributed to our radio program, The Job Search Solution ,every Monday through Friday from 8 PM to 8:30 PM on 620 AM, KXEB Dallas. Stephen Key can be reached through his firm, Key Harrington and Barnes at 214-615-7925. Russ Brown of the law firm Brown Fox Law, can be reached at 214-613-3350. Every Friday evening we interview Stephen Key about all kinds of legal issues in employment and we probably get more questions about non-compete agreements than anything else. I am personally NOT giving legal advice here. You’ll have to get that from these guys. But I am going to address some of the common issues we run into as recruiters.
The first one I’ve mentioned above and it’s that the candidate doesn’t think his or her non-compete agreement will be enforceable. It may or may not be enforceable, but the idea that they don’t mean anything in the state of Texas is totally nuts. If you are an employee and you have a non-compete agreement you’d best get the advice of an attorney (the guys above) before you whimsically think that it won’t matter. We have placed candidates who were never asked about their non-compete agreement by the hiring authority, never mentioned in the interview about their non-compete and then after they show up for work, both they and their new employer get a threatening letter from their previous companies attorneys. Often, their attitude has been, “It doesn’t mean anything,” but their new employer has enough problems and doesn’t want to deal with any more hassles. More often than not, the new employee will get terminated right then.
Thirty five or forty percent of the time when I ask a candidate about their non-compete agreement, I’m told, “I don’t know if I have one or not.” At this comment I seriously wonder if I ought to be working with this candidate at all. If he or she isn’t bright enough to know whether or not they have a non-compete, it’s questionable as to whether they are going to be a good performer or not. Having said that, though, I’m amazed at the number of quality candidates who truly don’t know if they have a non-compete agreement and, what’s even more hideous, or stupid, is that they don’t know where their copy of it is. In fact, what brought this whole idea up for this topic was a candidate telling me this week that he knew he had a non-compete that he was absolutely certain that his company did not give it to him. I assured him that if they had gone to trouble to require a non-compete agreement upon hiring him, they were smart enough to be sure that they gave him a copy of it.

The guy went home to look through his employment papers that he thought he could find somewhere. He called me and said that he had looked around and couldn’t find any non-compete agreement and, he literally asked me how he would get one. (I can’t make this stuff up.) After a few minutes of discussion he came to the conclusion that the only way he was going to find a copy of the agreement he signed was to ask the human resources department for a copy of it. It didn’t take more than a moment for him to come to the conclusion that if he asked the HR department for a copy of his non-compete agreement it would certainly raise a big red flag. I suggested that he find a recently departed associate, and ask one of them for a copy of theirs, because usually the agreements are the same for most firms. He suggested that he could ask one of his close friends at the company and I reminded him that that is still a risky thing to do. We left it that he is going to think about how to find a copy of what he signed.
Simply put, a non-compete agreement typically restrains employees from engaging in a competing business with his or her former employer, in a certain geographical area and for a limited period of time following the termination of the employment relationship. Where the issues of non-competes become contentious is the interpretation of who a competitor really is, the reasonableness of a geographical area and the reasonableness of the period of time. I have personally read some non-compete agreements that communicate competitors to be just about anybody in any kind of business, geographical restrictions to be the whole world and time restrictions as being infinity, or close to it. When legal battles occur, they usually occur over these issues.

Knowing your company’s history of enforcing or trying to enforce non-compete agreements is important. I’ve had candidates tell me things like, “Well they haven’t ever gone after anybody over non-compete, so they won’t come after me.” According to Russ Brown, that is a fallacy. There might be a big difference in the impact of a CFO going to work for a competitor and that of a low level inside customer service rep. Just because your present company doesn’t pursue non-compete agreements with some parting employees doesn’t mean that they would not pursue one with you.

Some companies we do business with are extremely aggressive about enforcing their non-compete agreements. These organizations aggressively threat, and if need be, sue every ex-employee that goes to one of their competitors with the full intent of going to court, keeping the candidate from working and even seeking economic damages. The cost of money and time does not matter to them. They pursue everybody, regardless of the job level. These firms usually make it very clear to everyone who works in the company that they have no qualms about protecting themselves.

Some companies would rather negotiate with the exiting employee about limitations and come to an agreement about what everybody will or won’t do. The majority of organizations in the United States don’t want legal hassles, much less the expense and distraction they cause. So, often, these organizations will come to a “non-solicitation” agreement with the candidate who is leaving to go to work for a perceived competitor. Basically, these agreements state that the exiting employee will not communicate, sell to, or solicit the specific customers/clients they had worked with while being employed with the company they are leaving. An employee leaving the company should have a really good idea before they go to work for a competitor how their organization deals with this. Just remember that every case might be different and just because they might’ve come to this kind of an agreement with a previous employee who left doesn’t mean that they would agree to it with you.

In situations where companies are laying people off, they may request a non-compete agreement in order to receive a severance package. Most candidates that make this kind of an agreement understand exactly what they agreed to.

Interestingly enough, since 1973, I have seen very few who received a violation of a non-compete agreement go all the way to court. The major reason is – it’s expensive. Most companies are a lot more willing to go to this expense than the departing employee. Some companies, in trying to enforce their non-compete, will threaten to sue not only the candidate, but the company the candidate has gone to work for. Ninety-nine percent of the time the employee’s new company doesn’t want to have anything to do with a lawsuit, especially over an issue like this. (I have, however, known firms who will agree before they hire a new employee to take on the responsibility to defend that employee as well as themselves if a lawsuit comes about. It’s very rare and he did his only for a very high level position.)

Even if the initial stages of a threatening lawsuit begin…i.e. a “cease and desist” letter is sent and/or attorneys on both sides have to begin negotiating, it’s going to cost the new employee money. I read recently that the average cost for a candidate to negotiate a non-compete arrangement, to everyone’s satisfaction, after they had gone to work for the competitor, was $12,000. Some opportunities may well be worth that kind of investment. But when you consider the emotional and psychological strain of this kind of hassle along with the money, most people aren’t willing to do it.

On top of all of this, a new employer, unless they make some kind of agreement to avoid violating a previous non-compete agreement, is going to question your ethics, thinking that, “If you’d steal for them…you’d steal from me.” On the rare occasions that I have seen a lawsuit come about, don’t be surprised if your new employer begins to distance themselves from you just a bit. This is especially true if they are also being sued. Even though they might have agreed to experience this hassle with you, in their hearts, they never really expected a full-blown lawsuit. So, unless you’ve produced five or $10 million in revenue pretty damn quickly don’t expect them to back you up like they said they would.

There are all kinds of facets of a non-compete agreement other than the ones we’ve mentioned here. Most of the issues are not very pleasant. So, if you begin to think that your non-compete agreement doesn’t matter…think again.

You began your career as a relative snot-nosed kid and even though you performed well, you drank a little too much at parties, missed work or was late once in a while because of those late-night parties. Remember the time that you embarrassed your boss just a little bit at a business function with a little bit of a smartass remark or you thought it was a real good idea to “tell the truth” about what was going on in the department at a department meeting and irritated everybody.

Remember, in spite of all of this, you got promoted and your newfound “authority” went to your head and you were the ‘cock of the walk’ for some time. Until, of course, your department didn’t do so well and your boss’s boss implied it was your fault. And then there was a time when you and your department were the number one department for the year… and you reminded everybody about it for a very, very long time. Remember the time that you played favorites with one of your direct employees and everybody could see it. Remember when you told one of your employers where they could take their job and stuff it, just before he resigned and went to another company. Remember when you let your personal life get in the way of your performance and, even worse, when everybody in your organization knew about it because you talked about it incessantly.

Remember when you got “encouraged” to leave a company with the understanding that as long as you left quietly, no one needed to know the real reason. Remember the year you were promoted again, knowing that it was as much politics as it was performance and half of the folks didn’t think you deserved it. Remember when you rub it in with the people that didn’t think you deserved it and, even though you performed extremely well, you reminded them from time to time how they didn’t support you.

And, as your career grew, even though you performed well, you made a couple of enemies and instead of making peace, you fanned the fire and made it clear that it was you versus them. In fact, you got a little bit of a competitive charge out of it, thinking that kind of scenario just comes with business. All along you kind of just figured that you’re always going to have some kind of enemies and it wasn’t any big deal.

Well, a month or so ago a real good opportunity to change jobs came along and you went for it. It was a VP job and a real step up from what you been doing. After the third interview, the company you were interviewing with checked a “backdoor” reference with some people you had worked with before. And in the process, one, some, or all of the things you “remember” got uncovered. It just cost you the job.

Might be too late for you, but you might want to remind the kids that work for you even one or two levels below you that whatever you do as you climb the ladder will be remembered and you will be cursed or blessed by what others remember also.

Our candidate gave the same references to every firm he was interviewing with…which, fortunately was quite a few. He had three clients of ours checking his references at the same time.He came in second on every job opportunity..which isn’t bad becasue every company’s #2 is someone else’s #1.A

But by the time he got on “third base” with another company, they needed to check his references.

Well, one of the guys he had given simply got tired of giving a reference and wouldn’t return the calls of the potential employer.He just ignored the request. In fact, he wouldn’t return the candidate’s call to find out why he all of a sudden wouldn’t give a reference. Not only was it embarrassing for the candidate, but it really made him look less than what he said he was. He scrambled to get two others.

This is not the first time this kind of thing is happened. Every professional would like to help another professional and certainly don’t mind doing it when it comes to references. It’s one of those “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back” kinds of things. But, when people feel taken advantage of, they’ll get irritated and just plain ignore the situation.

lesson: use a number of different references…keep them informed about who you are going to recommend them to… try to vary them…if you wear them out, they won’t help you.

Okay, so this is going sound very mundane to some of you and it’s probably rather so that I even have to bring it up. But the unfortunate thing is that many people’s titles don’t reflect what their company does or what they do on their resume. Just because you know what your company does doesn’t mean that other people do. I can’t tell you the number of resumes I get with the names of the companies that the person has worked for with absolutely no explanation at all of what the company’s business is. And regarding position titles, one company’s VP of sales is another company’s sales person. Another company’s director is another company’s board member.

Why are these important? Well, I keep having to remind people that your resume is not really “read.” Your resume is scanned… this is especially true if it’s read on the screen. Psychologists tell us that when people “read” things on a computer screen, their eyes go to the middle of the page moved to the left margin and then go up then they scan down the page. They pick out words… names of companies, titles, etc. If They don’t recognize them and they are not explained, is just as easy for the reader of the resume to move on to the other 179 resumes(The average number of resumes that are received for each job posted is 180).

On top of this, 60% of the people that have initially look at your resume don’t have any real idea of what the job is you are applying for. Much of the time “screeners” in the HR department or even some administrative person in another department will be told to, “review those resumes and bring to me the ones that ‘look’ to have the kind of experience we are looking for.” Some of these resume screeners know what they’re looking for and some don’t. In most companies, they don’t. They are told to look for certain keywords or attributes or experience that they have no real understanding of. The interviewing or hiring authorities who instructed them to perform this function have no idea what kind of resumes these screeners will pass up. (The way that I know this is, I can’t tell you the number of people we have actually placed with companies whose resume was sent to the company by the candidate or by another recruiter and passed over until we got them the interview.)

So, make sure that right next to the name of the company you’re working for you give a short simple explanation of exactly what they do. Don’t assume that other people know what your company does. Explain it to them. If you work for a big company that has hordes of departments and hordes of people, right after the name of the company identify the division or the department that you work for and what that division or Department sspecifically does. And, be sure to do that in terms most anyone can understand.

Regarding your title, even if your company gives you some kind of cockamamie title like “#1 Customer Experience Advocate” and your job is customer service, change your title to “Customer Service.” If your title is “Vice President of the Western World” but the function of your job is sales, change your title to “Sales.” I know this sounds a bit facetious, but people who read resumes, or should I say, scan resumes will look at a title and make a judgment about what you do and if it isn’t really clear what your function is by your title, they may pass you over without even thinking about it or reading what you do.

I happen to place sales in all level of sales managers in high tech. I’ve interviewed numbers of sales people whose title was “account manager.” An account manager to most people means that the person is simply “managing” an account. It communicates that the person is a “Farmer” rather than a “Hunter.” So, even if the candidate was the most aggressive, straight commission salesperson that ever existed, it is likely that his or her resume wouldn’t get read.

So, make it really clear on your resume what your company does and what you do or have done in the company. Make sure that someone totally unfamiliar with any of these things could read your resume and understand everything they need to know about you.

I’m only addressing this generation because there are more of you in the workplace than any other generation, and, at this writing, the 75 million of you (surpassing the baby boomers numbers of 74 million) are beginning to begin settling into your careers. As with previous generations, you’re going to change jobs more often early in your career (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and you need to be aware of some of the issues you are facing relative to getting a job. Please PAY ATTENTION!!!

So, I’m going to discuss some of the perceived traits that you, as a millennial, have and how they impact, for better or worse, your job search.

• Your expertise and reliance on technology
Most of us would agree that 99% of the advancements of technology are good for business. However, in the real world of getting a job, being “connected” is only of value if you can get you an interview. Somewhere along the line you’re going to have to have real-world conversations with people, i.e. interviews in order to get a job. Many of you rely on “just text me” to communicate. You cannot get a job by just texting. Speaking with people face -to -face, learning to look them in the eye and expressing yourself verbally in more than 140 characters is going to be necessary. This takes practice if you are not used to it.

• Confidence
It is said that you have been raised to believe that everyone gets a trophy for participating and that has given you confidence. Well, in business most people DO NOT get trophies. Now it’s true that the first step in being successful is actually showing up, but you don’t get confidence by simply being there. I have no problem with confidence but it needs to be tempered with humility. As Dizzy Dean (Google him if you don’t know who is) was quoted as saying, “It ain’t bragging if you can do it.” So, let your successes and accomplishments give you confidence. But, realize that your confidence will be interpreted as arrogance without performance.

• Multitasking
It is said that you all think you can do this well. If you research the studies on the subject of multitasking, you will soon discover that success at it is not only a myth, but it is actually a deterrent to quality work. So, don’t go into an interview touting the fact that you’re good at multitasking. Any interviewer with any brains will discount you if you tell them this is one of your workplace attributes.

• Friends come first
Try convincing a prospective employer that your friends are more important than the job you are applying for and you will continue to be unemployed. A few years of working in the real world, a spouse, a mortgage, a car payment, a couple of kids and the realization that it is likely that their college tuition per year is going to be more than you make in one, your friends will be far down the priority list. So, don’t embarrass yourself by even mentioning how important your friends are in the same breath as your needing a job.

• Play then work
Common sense should tell you that communicating anything like this in interviewing situation is disaster. But I have recently had candidates of the millennial generation say things like, “Well, my personal time is very important to me,” and by never bothering to explain what that means, be quickly eliminated from consideration. In fact, since your generation has a reputation for this trait, you better be damn sure you communicate in the interviewing process that work has an extremely high priority in your life.

• Focus on involvement and participation in teams
Okay, being a team player is important. Everyone in business has to be able to get along with everyone else. However, you better be able to perform on your own, by yourself, individually, regardless of what the team does or doesn’t do. It’s true that interviewing authorities are going to be interested in your ability to work in a group setting. No company wants a maverick that’s going to piss everybody off. However, if your focus on involvement is more important than your individual performance, this isn’t what business is about. You’re going to be accountable for your own performance. The team will take care of itself if each individual performs their duties well.

• Don’t worry about failure
You guys got this notion when everybody got a trophy whether they won or lost. But, in the real world you damn well better worry about failing. This doesn’t mean that you’re not going to fail. In fact, you’re going to fail a lot. But not to worry about it, as though it was no big deal, will keep you living at home and certainly without a job. Be aware that you have to put failure in the right perspective. (Read the quote by Michael Jordan about failure.) Learning from your failures is what’s important, but to blow it off as though you shouldn’t worry about it will not get you a job.

• “Respect my skills.”
Wake up! No one is going to automatically respect anything about you, especially your skills, unless you can demonstrate successful performance applying those skills.

• Connection to parents
This trait can be a good thing but also not so good. It’s not so good when your parents continue to let you live at home rather than forcing you to get out on your own nomatter how difficult or painful it may be. It’s not good when your parents keep giving you advice about the job market and what kind of a job might be available to you when they have no idea what the job market is really like. I’m sure they love you, but encouraging you to take nothing less than a VP job won’t help you. (Obviously, I’m being facetious when I say this. But I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had well-meaning parents give advice about the kind of job their prince or princess ought to get, regardless of their knowledge of the job market.)
It is good when mom and dad insist that you get off the dole by taking the best job you can find and go to work. They need to realize that the door to opportunity is open from the inside. No employer is going to automatically love their children the way they do. But that has nothing to do with the job or the opportunity that might be available to you.

• They want to ‘develop’ themselves
There’s a part of this trait that might be viable. If you begin to look at job opportunities from the “outside,” judging them by how you can personally “develop,” you are going to have a rough time. There might be a slim possibility that you can judge a job during the interviewing process regarding how it might provide personal growth. But most of the time, most companies aren’t really that interested in your personal growth and will neglect to talk about it during the interviewing process.
It is more likely that after you get a job, you will figure out for yourself how you can personally grow. It is not likely that the incentive for this is going to come from your job or your employer. It’s going to come from you, intrinsically. Finding ways to grow personally in your job should be a lifelong endeavor. The sooner you develop it the better.

• Constant feedback
You don’t have to worry about this trait too much. You’re going to get plenty of it, especially if you don’t perform very well. The needing of constant feedback however, can be a deterrent to your success. Constantly asking your superiors, “how am I doing,” is simply annoying. In the job search process you’ll get pretty damn quick feedback. Either you get a second interview after your first interview or you don’t. Either you get a job or you don’t. Pretty simple! After a while… a very short while… either in looking for a job or performing on one once you have it, you’ll get plenty of feedback. You won’t have to seek it. After all, feedback is the breakfast of champions.

• Personal relationships… with boss… with coworkers
This is a nice, idealistic thought and they can be great if you can find them. But, one, there is no way of knowing in an interviewing situation whether you’d be able to build a personal relationship with the person you’d be working for, and, two, be aware of this, that person you are interviewing with, who would be your direct boss, who might be close and caring could leave their job and the company in a heartbeat. Don’t go overboard with personal relationships at work. If you get good, valuable ones, that’s great, but remember, this is business not marriage.

• I’ll Google it myself
We all know you’re independent and feel like you can find things out on your own, either on the Internet or by asking friends. However, the organization you are interviewing with or working for will have made a tremendous number of mistakes which result in policies, procedures and “this is the way we do things” practices. Please refrain from thinking you need to reinvent the wheel or enlighten the whole company with your discoveries. Don’t be so stubborn as to not stop, listen, and learn what goes on in the company before you start “changing” it.

• Feeling entitled
Your helicopter parents might have raised you this way and the college or university you attended may have gone out of their way to make you feel special (You Really were special to them. You paid them more than $33,000 a year in private school tuition, almost $10,000 a year in tuition for an in-state public college or university and almost $25,000 for out-of-state tuition at a public college. And these figures do not include room, board and other kinds of fees. Pay me that kind of money over six years, which is how long the average college graduate goes to school and I’ll be more than happy to tell you that you are special.)

To most companies that are going to interview you and hire you, you aren’t special until you perform. You aren’t entitled to a job, a paycheck or continued employment. You aren’t entitled to a pay raise or promotion until you earn it. Working is a privilege, not a right. The mantra of these organizations is that, “if you do your job, you get to keep it!”
View work as something to be done between weekends. Approach interviewing and a new job like this and you’ll get to have one permanent, long weekend.

“I’ll market myself to the highest bidder”. And, parenthetically, “I can leave in a heartbeat, you know!” This is the height of solipsism and egocentricity and unless you are the center of the universe, which you are not or a draft pick in the NFL or NBA, in this job market you probably don’t have another “bidder.” So, stop this silly business, take any reasonable job you can and work your ass off.

Some of you are just beginning your career. Some of you are in your late 30s and have learned all of these lessons which the marketplace has taught you. The longer you’re in the workforce, the more you realize that all of these “generational characteristics” melt away and we all advance and decline in our job search and our professional life based on the same rules.

One last thought which only applies to the male millennial’s… You’d make a lot better impression when you interview if you shave. Just a thought!