Tony Beshara

My wife, Chrissy, loves Shark Tank. It is probably one of the most popular shows on television although most people probably won’t admit it. Chrissy not only watches it on Friday night where most of the new episodes appear, but also three or four other nights a week where they do reruns. There are some of these we’ve seen at least three times. I’ve often thought that it would be a good idea for every job seeker in America to watch Shark Tank. Here are some of the lessons:

The first lesson is to look and be likable. When people come out on shark tank dressed nicely, smiling, looking sincere, like they’re there to help other people with their product or service, and come across as simply nice always have an advantage. The ones that come out looking like they think the world revolves around them, overdressed, trying to look sexy, communicating, “Im da’ bomb,” or a guy who communicates, “I’m a stud,” already have a strike against them. You could almost see the sharks bristle when they walk into the “tank”. First lesson: look and be likeable!(It is amazing to me how many seemingly poor ventures get funded by the Sharks when they are presented by a really likable person. If you ever watch the show, see how many times one of those sharks says, “… I really like you” and then offers to back the person in spite of the product’s flaws.)

The second lesson is to have something clear,different, even if simple, to say. So many people get on Shark Tank and really don’t know how to tell a simple story about what they do and what they’re about. Often, they get through with their presentation and the sharks have to ask them, “we don’t really understand… what are you trying to do?” The Sharks get lost in some roundabout, unclear story about what they are being asked to invest in. Second lesson: keep it simple!

The third lesson is to know exactly what benefits your product or service providing others. A product or service that, “revolutionizes the world in 10 different ways” never sells. A person only needs two or three features, advantages and benefits in order to make a sale. They have to be very important features advantages benefits i.e. ones that can’t be found any other way. Over the years both Chrissy and I have noticed that the most popular Shark Tank products have been targeted toward one simple problem. They seem to be the quickest to get funded by the sharks, and also the most successful. Third lesson: know what you’re selling!

The fourth lesson is to anticipate objections. Often it only takes the sharks a few questions to reveal that the presenters don’t appear to have been totally “truthful” with the sharks. By asking questions, the sharks discover credit issues, debt issues, partner issues, etc. they didn’t reveal in their presentation. When this happens, the sharks feel deceived, like the seekers of the investment are trying to “put one over on them.” Most of the time these folks get sent packing rather rudely. Fourth lesson: know what the objections to you being hired are and reveal them, so to speak, in your presentation.

The fifth lesson is to have a simple solution to a difficult problem, demonstrate how it works, then ask for the order. No matter how complicated the product might be, the most successful Shark Tank solicitors present their solution in a simple manner, demonstrate it, the ask for the investment. Candidates interviewing need to do the same thing. “The companies that I’ve worked for in the past had a problem with…..(accounting, IT, sales, customer support, marketing,Production, manufacturing, etc.). And here is how I helped solve the problem….I can do the same for you. Now, when can I go to work?” Here is where the specific features of your ability become advantages to the company you have worked for and how those companies benefited from them. This communicates to a prospective employer that since you’ve done that for past employers, you will do it for them. You then, simply ask for the job.Fifth lesson: sell features, advantages and benefits, then ask for the order.

Shark Tank lessons for the job seeker!

This is an email that I got back from where my candidates when I wrote them and told them that the organization that we had been to three interviews with was going to pass. They stated they were going to hire someone else and that my candidate wouldn’t be considered. The hiring manager gave me some really weak reasons as to why my candidate didn’t do well in the interviews. I related these to my candidate and not only did he deny them but explained to me that the hiring manager totally missed one of the points that my candidate had made.

I understand my candidate’s feelings and the graphic expression of his frustration. I am somewhat biased, but my candidate has been tremendously successful in just about everything that he has ever done and the reasons our client was passing pretty weak. Based on what I could see, the candidate was a better performer than the guy doing the interviewing and the hiring authority was likely afraid Of the candidate.

Regardless of the reasons, however, the attitude of my candidate is not good. Getting mad and telling them to f’off isn’t going to create a situation where the candidate is going to learn from the interview. We all realize that it is an emotional reaction to being rejected. And being rejected is never fun. But whenever this happens, we have to take as much of a positive attitude towards it as we can and be open to learning from it. It is very hard to learn from this kind of situation when you’re all pissed off, mad and angry.

So before you “f’em,” calm down and think, “I don’t like the results of this a bit, but what could I have done differently to get a different outcome? What have I learned? How can I do better?”

Just read a great book, Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. It chronicles ancient as well as modern historical disasters as a result of leaders’ big egos. It reminded me of the Sanskrit quote that, “ego is a mistake of the intellect.”

It also reminded me of the interviewing situation… on both sides of the desk. All of us will admit that there are some pretty phenomenally big egos out there in business. Some people feel that in order to be successful they have to be the center of attention. For whatever inadequacy they may have in their personality makeup, they feel the best way to offset their inadequacy is to be particularly egotistical. (I worked with the hiring authority some years back who actually told candidates that his job was to hire people to make “him look good.” And it would be their job to do the same.)

Many job candidates feel as though they must assert their ego in the interviewing situation. “After all,” they say, “if I don’t toot my own horn in the interview, no one will pay attention to me.” And hiring authorities often want to communicate that they are just that, the “authority.” These kind of managers are phenomenally difficult to interview with, much less work for. And, frankly, there is very little a candidate can do about it when interviewing. If you’re a job candidate, and you are offered the opportunity to work with such a person, you’d best ask a lot of questions of the people who presently work there  to see if you can work for this kind of personality. Sometimes, managers come across much more egotistically in the interviewing environment than they really are. Often, this kind of ego can be worked “with” rather than “for.”

As a job candidate, however, there is a great deal you can do about taming your ego. There’s a really big difference between having a healthy ego and a big ego. A person with a healthy ego puts their accomplishments in the light of how they helped their previous company or their previous customers succeed. They couch their successes in terms of others rather than themselves. You hear them using the terms “we” and “fortunate,” and “blessed” as well as “the team” and “great clients.” They connect their successes of the past to the great mentors they had. They recall their “wins” with the same humility as their experience of failure. They put failure in the context of what they learned and take full, personal responsibility for outcomes. They focus on process rather than results. They take what they do seriously but not themselves too seriously. They accept failure as well as success with the same grateful attitude. They sell their strengths with humility and readily admit their weaknesses with humor and a smile.

Many candidates, because they are nervous and anxious about interviewing, go overboard in the ego department. Because they are nervous and insecure they feel compelled to push what “they” have done. “I…I…I…” becomes their mantra.

Interviewing in this manner takes practice.

The, I heard this week from a candidate who got laid off… Three months ago. He lamented that for the past six months is job, he was able to “see it coming” but for some reason thought he could dodge the inevitable. Upon asking him how his interviewing was going, he said that he really only had three or four and they had gone that well. He said that he was probably spending too much time talking about his previous job and how he had seen the writing on the wall. He did spend an inordinate amount of time talking about what he “should have seen coming.”

A case could be made that one of the reasons, if not more, that he should have not been hired was that he wasn’t smart enough to see the layoff coming. I mean, he kept talking about how stupid he was not to see it coming. After all, if he’s Not that bright maybe he isn’t a very good businessperson. Well, I’m being cynical and that’s not fair. He actually is a very bright guy, with a very good track record. I advised him, however that although he may that shipments coming he only needed to do it once in an interview and then go on and sell himself, trying to get the job.

The truth is that most of us can be in a company for lots of reasons is laying off and letting people go for some reason we have this invincible attitude that, “it won’t happen to me.” It is wishful thinking so we stick our heads in the sand and then become totally shocked when our number comes up and lament, “I should’ve seen it coming.”

Looking for a job as a first-class pain in the butt, especially when you have one. No one likes to look for a job, if you have a job, it’s like having a second one. It is dreadful. It is so dreadful, folks just simply deny what they see. The psychological term is called “inattentional blindness.” (Google the video.) The medical term is ‘scotoma.” In situations like this, folks just plain don’t want to admit or “see” that they need to change jobs before the layoff catches up to them.What makes things even worse is that not only do they miss the coming exit but feel doubly stupid for getting caught with their pants down. No one likes getting laid off, but you really feel dumb when you could, “see it coming all along” and do nothing about it when you first got the inkling.

So here’s the lesson: Start looking for a job  before you desperately need one, before you get laid off, before you find yourself saying, “I could see it coming…but I just can’t believe it”

A few weeks ago we pondered Donald Trump’s bombastic style of “interviewing” in the debates. Obviously, it didn’t matter that his style in the debates wasn’t the best to “land the job.” Obviously, a person can have even a number of bad interviews and still get hired.

Now comes one of the most common interviewing excuses of all time. What’s so amazing about this excuse is that I hear it at least three or four times a week, maybe even more. It is the excuse that, “I didn’t get the job because of someone else.” In Sec. Clinton’s case, she was blaming James Comey for her losing the election. Last week, I had three candidates that didn’t get a job because, in their words, “my last boss was an idiot”… “I couldn’t find my references fast enough”… “I know I didn’t sell myself very well, but they should know that I’ve got a job and they should come after me if they want me.”

There are literally thousands of excuses every day of why people don’t get hired. Unfortunately, 99% of them involved blaming other people. A month or two ago I had a candidate tell me that he didn’t interview very well because he had to take their dog to the vet before the interview and he was distracted by the dog’s illness (….the dog’s fault). Don’t laugh, over the years I’ve heard things like, “I couldn’t find a parking spot (… so I was 20 minutes late)”… “My spouse and I had a fight night before,”… “I stayed up too late watching the ballgame and didn’t get enough sleep”… “I fell asleep in the lobby, waiting for the interviewer because their music was so relaxing.” I could go on with reasons you wouldn’t believe, but rarely does anybody say, “you know I didn’t get the job because I just totally messed up… and next time I’ll do better!”

I guess it’s human nature to want to blame someone else when you don’t get hired or when the outcomes of an event don’t go in your favor. But it’s always best to look within yourself and ask, “what did I do to go wrong here?” There are boatloads of people, this week, who are speculating where Hillary went wrong and lost the election. In spite of all of the phenomenal number of excuses that there are… like, just not paying attention to the real folks in this country… the only thing we’ve heard from Hillary herself, yesterday, is that she’s blaming James Comey. Instead of turning to her party and saying, “here’s where I messed up…” she’s blaming someone else.

Here’s the lesson: we may not be able to control what happens to us. But we can control how we respond to it. If we respond to what happens to us by blaming other people instead of asking ourselves what we could have done to be better, we will perpetuate our “losing.” If we admit our mistakes and take responsibility for what we could have done better we grow to not only become better at the task but also as better people.

When you’re looking for a job, especially when you’re looking full time, there is a tendency to gradually lose the discipline of a steady, systematic, process oriented job search. Looking for a job is in emotionally stressful thing to do. We mentioned it often but, next to death of a spouse, death of a parent and death of a child, coupled with divorce, the most emotionally stressful thing we do is look for a job. This becomes even more difficult when a person has been fired or let go unexpectedly. Instead of immediately taking massive action and developing a systematic, process oriented job search, often people “take a break.”

People, in this situation, because they are emotionally thrown off, just aren’t ready, they say, to start looking for a job. It’s just simply easier to take time off, go visit family, play little golf, fix up the house… anything, except look for a job. And unfortunately, the longer one goes postponing a disciplined job-search, the harder it is to do. It’s not uncommon for this kind of thing to happen in the job-search to get postponed for weeks, even months.

I will admit that it’s really hard the day after you get canned, to wake up and enthusiastically say, “this is a great day to start a new job search. I’m so glad it arrived!” And then sit down and develop a systematic plan to find a job, develop a call list of people who might hire you, start making appointments, develop an interview script, practice it and have a real positive attitude towards looking for a job.

One of the first things to go, especially in an unexpected job-search, is personal discipline. So, I recommend to people that they begin, as fast as they can, to structure their day with his much discipline as possible. If people begin discipline with the little things, then it is easy to discipline themselves to do the big things, like making appointments, practice interviewing, etc. This means to begin every day with discipline. Wake up at the same time every day, make your bed, dress as though you were going to a job, get to your desk and go to work. The more disciplined person is, especially in the very beginning of their job search, the better they do at the job search and, usually, it’s a much shorter duration of unemployment.

It is really easy to dismiss this kind of thing, and say, “Tony, come on, this doesn’t make that big a difference.” Well, yes it does! When it comes to an emotionally challenging activity, like finding a job, everything makes a difference. The more disciplined a person is in the little things the easier it is for them to be disciplined in the big things.

So, make your bed!

unfortunately, I hear this comment… from both candidates and clients quite often. Candidates use the statement to explain why they left certain companies and moved to another one, even after a short period of time. Employers use it to condemn candidates for changing jobs too many times. Ironically enough, they’re both right.

In 1973, when I got into this profession, the average company in the United States was 59 years old. In 2014 average age of a company was 12 years old. More companies come and go faster than they ever in the history of our economy. More companies are shut down and more people lose their jobs with either short notice or no notice at all than has ever happened. In the past 20 years the idea of “employment for life” with a company has gone the way of the $100,000 fax machine.

Back in those days, companies hired people implying that even through difficult times, the company would do their best to keep employees. They even offered employees opportunities to take pay cuts during tough times…even the leaders…with the promise that when the economy and business came back around, the levels of pay would be restored. There was a “we’re all in this together” attitude. Management shared with employees the ‘state’ of the company. Even when companies laid people off, they often promised to hire them back when times got better…and did. There seemed to be empathy and understanding for everyone. Even folks who were laid off, understood. (if you’re old enough to remember,  IBM hired people “for life.”)

It seems to me, and i have done no research on this, that after the last two recessions things have changed. Companies come and go faster, as mentioned above, and there is more of a callousness toward their employees. The avreage company life span is just below two business cycles. with the vast majority of companies in the United States (98%) having less than 100 people, profit margins got slimmer, business cycles got narrower, things like the dot-com bust, 9/11 and the financial collapse seemed to impact all businesses faster than ever. Regulations and taxes have further burdened even small businesses. Not only do business managers need to be persevering forward but they also are looking over their shoulder wondering “what’s going to happen next.” (Even IBM had to lay people off.) The average 40-year-old in the United States has changed jobs 10 times, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and they  also tell us average professional in the United States Is going to change careers 5 to 7 times in their work life.

It appears to me that the faster technology grows, the more volatility there is with both employers and employees. In generations past, people went to work in the mines, on the farms and in the railroads and the factories for life. As technology advanced the necessity for these people diminished, replaced by fewer, more cognitive workers. Diodes and resistor gave way to the manufacturing of the chip. Technology got faster and job tenure got shorter. Look at what big data is doing to our businesses now. It’s made everybody even more nervous.

this hypersensitivity and skittishness on the part of business owners and managers transfers to the people that work at their company. Since business owners and managers don’t feel secure, employees don’t feel secure. Even the managers of these companies, close to the owners are constantly wondering what’s going to happen. It’s not that people don’t want to trust each other, it’s that everyone is afraid  to trust each other. So, employers are not trusted by their employees to be looking out for them and employers don’t trust their employees that they are looking out for them. Everyone feels like that the other guy is only looking out for himself.

Understanding this environment has its unintended consequences. No longer can management go to the employees and say, “look where having a really difficult time. We’re going to have to cut back on salaries for a while and of course expenses. We would like everybody to understand and pitch in any way they can. But we’ll get through this and we will all be better and stronger for it. Obviously, we will make this up to the folks that help us when we come out of this situation.” Understanding the business environment today, every member of that company would start looking for a job the very next day. This business environment creates the feeling on the part of employees that they are “expendable” and they can be let go and any time, so they don’t mind leaving where they are at the drop of a hat, before (they perceive) they will get let go at the drop of a hat.

So, companies don’t feel any loyalty on the part of their employees, because the employees don’t feel any loyalty on the part of their employer. It’s a vicious cycle. Companies, then, don’t hesitate to let people go with no notice any employees don’t hesitate to leave with practically no notice. Employees will often leave their employment, even after a short time for a job that offers even a little more money because, their attitude is, “well, I never know when I’m going to get laid off so I need to make the most money that I can as fast as I can and get while the getting is good.”

There’s no telling which came first, the chicken or the egg. It’s one thing certain, there just simply isn’t any loyalty. Some people might say, “well it’s just better that way!… everybody knows where the other guy stands.!”

We can do it this way. We can all operate under distrust. It’s really not a good way to do it, but we can. There just isn’t much loyalty.

Joseph has been with this company for about two years. He’d been on his last job for five years in the job before that, ten. He was first line manager at a pretty aggressive company and had followed a friend of his to the company that he had worked for a number of years earlier. Trusting his friend, when he took the job he may be didn’t get as detailed of an idea of how the compensation plan worked. He trusted his friend I was anxious to go to work for him, and the new company seemed reasonable enough with some positive nuances that his old company didn’t have.

First-line managers jobs are often the most difficult. Those blessed souls have all kinds of responsibility, not a lot of authority and, especially in sales don’t make anywhere near the money that salespeople can make. The influence that these people may have over their earnings isn’t anywhere near as great as it was when they were on first-line. This is especially true in sales but also in other professions.

After about the first eight months of his employment Joseph started realizing that the compensation program wasn’t quite “as advertised.” There were a lot of “if, ands and buts” in the fine lines of his earnings agreement and unless the planets aligned perfectly he was never going to make within $50,000 of what he had made in last job that he left. That’s when he started getting a little irritated.

He loved the job and loved the people, though. He had more responsibility than he had before. He knew when he joined the company that there were some ‘challenges,’ but he just knew he could overcome them and do well. Then his duties expanded and, in his case, his quota went up but his compensation program didn’t. He found out that it was really hard to fire people at this company and almost a lot harder to hire people. Then a “hand tieing”  policy for absolutely everything and it seemed like the corporate counsel just about ran the company.

Joseph’s region quickly became the number one region in the country and although he was getting all kinds of accolades, i.e. name recognition in the corporate newspaper, a really nice engraved watch and recognition (applause) at the corporate meeting… It wasn’t affecting his pocket book one bit. At first, he voiced his concern to his erstwhile friend, boss. But as time went on his concern became frustration and then he became downright pissed off. His boss is a really good guy but he couldn’t do much about anything and he certainly couldn’t help Joseph make more money. The longer he worked there more frustrated he became.

So, the other day, Joseph told his boss, in a moment of anger that he just wasn’t going to take it any longer and he quit. Joseph was a client of ours, so he decided to come by and talk about it.

He admits that it was a moment of great emotion when they were having a discussion (argument) about his quote and how he was going to attain it. Joseph has a tremendous amount of emotion and passion and sometimes, gets in trouble.

He quit without a job. He weakly, rationalized the fact that he quit without a jobBy stating that, “I’ve never had trouble finding another job.” But the truth is the guy his only had three jobs in almost 20 years and every time he changed he went to work for somebody that was a “friend” of his. Joseph has absolutely no idea how difficult it is going to be for him to find a job. Hiring managers off the street only happens one out of eight times. The other seven times people are promoted from within, whether they deserve it or not. And in this economy there are fewer managers and there’s ever been. The shock of Joseph’s dilemma was beginning to set in.

Don’t get me wrong. Joseph is an excellent manager. The jobs like that are very, very, very rare. One can’t just raise their hand and say, “I’m ready,” and have the job appear. In between the lines, Joseph expressed, fallaciously, but most people think, that “there’s always a good place for a good manager.” Well this just isn’t so. If Joseph (and me) are fortunate enough to find the opening in his fairly narrow discipline of business, he will have a good chance. That’s a big “if.”

When I explained to him that this could go on for months, (I’m talking, 6 to 8 months) his eyes glazed over a bit. Joseph’s a really good guy and he might get lucky. But it would’ve been a lot more prudent to find a job before he left this one.

Here’s the lesson. No matter how pissed off and irritated you get, don’t leave your (lousy) job for you secured another one. You never know how long it’s going to take to find another one.

We will keep you posted as to how Joseph’s search is coming along.