Job Search Solution Blog by Tony Beshara

It happens after every recession. This is my eighth one since 1973 and here’s how it happens. When candidates are plentiful and companies are operating in a recession and operating out of fear of loss, rather than vision of gain, hiring managers invent all kinds of cockamamie “steps” in the hiring process, thinking that it’s going to keep them from “making a hiring mistake”, because they feel like they have lots of candidates to choose from and because they want to spread the risk.  They invent steps in the process, thinking that it’s going to protect them. They increase the number of interviews that a candidate has to go through. They come up with ideas like: group interviews (with half of the group comprised of people who have nothing to do with the job) testing of all sorts, interviews with external, company advisors, group presentations (just to be sure the candidate can speak in front of a group). One CEO of a small size firm wanted to get his wife’s and daughter’s opinion of a candidate (of course, they had absolutely nothing to do with the day-to-day running of the business). Years ago, a candidate and his wife were asked to go to dinner with the chairman of a bank, his wife, three of the vice presidents and their wives. After the dinner, the men asked their wives to literally vote on whether or not to hire the candidate. My candidate “lost” the election. To this day he swears it was because his wife was a whole lot more attractive than any of the other wives and the other wives just plain didn’t like it. Who knows?

Just this last month, a company  requiring our candidate  to go through a process of  having six interviews, held over a number of days get, saw its candidate hired by one of their direct competitors that initially interviewed the candidate one day with two follow-up  zoom interviews the next day and the final zoom interview the next business day and an offer… and acceptance… were made on the day after. Our client was absolutely furious from having lost out on the candidate and was exasperated,  saying, “we just can’t move that fast.”

Another one of our candidates refused to give a presentation to a group who required it is part of the interviewing process. She said, “Look, I’ve got a job that requires a lot of effort. We have three teenagers and when I’m not working, I’m parenting. I have a 20 year excellent track record in what I do, and these guys want me to make a presentation to see if I know how to make a presentation? Forget them!” It was painful, but she has a point. She has an outstanding, extremely verifiable, track record that speaks for itself. The management of the company was so myopically stuck on a procedural formality in the hiring process that it lost track of the whole reason they were speaking with her which was because she was so well known in their profession as a top performer. (She had been kicking their butt in the marketplace.)

In another situation after three interviews, our candidate was told that he had to take one more “perfunctory” interview with someone with Human Resources at the corporate office.  Unfortunately, the Human Resources Director was off for spring break. The hiring authority was caught up in his own bureaucratic red tape, saying he really didn’t have any choice but to wait. The candidate accepted another offer before the perfunctory interview could be arranged, causing the company to lose out on an excellent candidate.

All the old adages apply… time kills deals…. when you snooze, you lose, etc. The message is that this market has gotten a lot more competitive for good candidates. Whenever we come out of a recession, it usually takes about six months for hiring authorities in companies to catch on that when they drag interviewing out they are going to lose really good candidates.

Other than C-level candidates, which might be an exception, there should never be more than three, at the most, four interviews for any candidate. Nobody should be involved in the interviewing process whose livelihood doesn’t depend on the performance of the individual being interviewed.  Studies have shown that one person… yes, you read right… one person doing the hiring is no more successful than three, four or sixteen people involved in the  interviewing and hiring  process.

The company that is requiring the candidate to make a presentation instituted a new policy a few months ago requiring a candidate to study what their company does… which would take at least three or four hours… and then make a presentation to three or four executives on the benefits of their company and their product. It is doubtful that any candidate who is presently employed is going to consider doing it. This is especially true for candidates with  good track records. If they lose enough candidates to this process, they will eventually change their procedure. There’s no telling, however, how many good candidates they are going to miss.

It’s kinda sad!

It happens every year. It’s a rather unbelievable phenomenon and you’d think after more than 47 years of doing this, I’d be used to, as Teilhard de Chardin writes, people are “spiritual beings acting human.”

The “acting human” aspect of this is that more times than I’d like to think about it, candidates missed the opportunity to interview and employers missed the opportunity to interview good candidates because of….spring break! It absolutely drives me nuts. It happened three times last week. The first time, was with a CEO candidate…yes, a CEO who has  been out of work for six months had the opportunity to interview for a job as a CEO, in his profession, the only interview he’s been able to secure in three months…and  he tells me that he can’t go on the interview because he’s going skiing in Colorado for spring break.  “What?…You are going on spring break… spring break. I’ve gotten you the only interview you’ve had in three months and you can’t go because you’re going on spring break????” “Well, I guess I could come back I have to,” he says with a terribly unconvincing, low tone.

The private equity group who was doing the hiring interviewed two other of our candidates and is going to pursue both of them. If one of them does not pan out, they may very well consider the CEO who went skiing.

One of our hiring authorities, (I hate to call them “clients,” because it connotes a much higher business acumen than most deserve)  interviews four excellent candidates  last week and tells us she loves all of the candidates and is going to have them back and will decide to hire one… after she gets back from spring break next week.  “Geez… we aren’t sure that they’re going to be around when you get back,” we tell her. “Well, you came up with those four. You guys are good. I’m sure you can find three or four more,” she says. It is possible that these candidates will still be around when she gets back. But two candidates  she is now focused on are excellent and, fortunately, we’ve been able to get them a number of interviews.

We make it look easy to come up with really good candidates. Well, that is what we are supposed to do. But, it isn’t that easy. This market has bounced ridiculously high in the last two months and all of a sudden, candidates are harder and harder to find. Based on what this lady is looking for, it won’t be easy to find others. “Can’t you do a Skype or a zoom meeting with them, while you were on vacation?” we ask. “No, where we’re going hardly has any Internet capability. It’s just gonna have to wait till I get back.” Well, okay, not much we can do.

The third situation involved a hiring authority, whose corporate policy was to have one of their corporate leaders interview his final candidate for a director’s position. The candidate has made it very clear, in a well-balanced tone, that he is receiving two other offers. We asked the hiring authority if his corporate superior could interview the candidate via Skype or zoom while on vacation next week. The answer came back, “no.” The corporate manager was not interested in interviewing anyone while he was on spring break. The candidate says that he is willing to wait. What choice does he have? But, human nature, being what it is, we won’t be surprised if next week, our candidate gets another offer from one or two of these other organizations (neither one of which we are representing). It wouldn’t surprise us at all if he took one of them because he’s tired of looking for a job and he’s really good. “A bird in the hand.”

This kind of thing happens every year and it’s very frustrating. When I was growing up the idea of “spring break,” was simply one day, Good Friday, and my brother and I would go to our father’s laundry and work. I don’t think I ever heard of spring break until our kids were in high school.

I don’t have a problem with anybody wanting to take a vacation. But when you’ve been looking for a job for three or four months and you get the chance to interview and you decide to go on spring break instead, I wonder about your values. When anyone’s spring break is more important than hiring the right kind of candidate, we’ve got our values out of sync.

I hate spring break!

Joseph is an excellent candidate. He has had 10 years at the same organization, performed very well, has accolades and paychecks to prove he has been successful in sales. His company however, has not been giving him the technical support that his customers have been used to receiving and gradually he’s losing his share of the market. So, he decides he needs to change jobs.

He has been earning in the $200,000-$300,000 range for the past five or six years, so finding him an opportunity much outside the type of business he has been in is fairly unlikely. Obviously, he has some exceptional advantages to competitors and since he has no non-compete agreement (except for a handful of present customers) he is very marketable.

There are five or six major players in the space that he has been in and we contacted all of them. Three told us that they just do not have any need at all right now and don’t see anything coming up in the next two or three quarters. Three people agreed to interview Joseph. One  made it clear that he wasn’t looking to hire anybody probably for another four or five months and that Joseph should not get his hopes up, but he was always interested in interviewing a good candidate (smart guy). The other two that agreed to interview Joseph were actively looking only if the “right person” came along.

We explained to Joseph, to begin with, that we make this process look easy, because we are supposed to. We explained to him that even though he knows he has a good background, he should not let it go to his head and that we happen to catch these people at the right time. When a candidate has been in any one place this long and experienced the kind of success Joseph has, there is often a tendency for it to go to their head. They think they are more marketable and desirable than they really are. Most of the time, this is more an issue of ignorance rather than stupidity. They don’t go out into the market looking for a job very often…hardly at all and when they do, and they all of a sudden get two or three interviews, they have a tendency to think that finding a new job is easy.

Of course, we warned Joseph of this and thought it was clear. When we started the interviewing process with these three organizations, Joseph was always very difficult to get on the phone (our first clue).  We would call him…he would never directly answer…we’d leave a message and he would call maybe a day or so later. When we went to arrange interviews, even after giving us the times he could do them, he would inevitably ask to change the times (he did this all three times).

The organization that really didn’t need to hire anybody who was interested in speaking with Joseph, interviewed him, but didn’t care for him at all. They thought he was arrogant and full of himself. We had warned  Joseph about this to begin with, but apparently it took a “rejection” for him to catch on. Joseph eliminated the second organization because he really didn’t like the territory that they had in mind for him. But Joseph did aggressively pursue our third client.

He began by telling them after an initial interview, that he was very interested in the opportunity and would definitely like to pursue it. He communicated that it was a better opportunity than where he was and he was “ready to go.” When it came time for Joseph to interview with the next level of management, he had to… for business reasons, according to him…postpone the interviews. This took almost two weeks to complete. When he got to the next level of interviews he sold himself really well and made it clear that he would “entertain” an offer. He was telling us that he really liked what he saw and he really wanted to go to work at the organization because it was a better deal than what he had.

Then Joseph got a little more flaky. The company wanted to check references. It took him a whole week to get the references to them. They were beginning to wonder about Joseph’s sincerity, but he convinced them that he traveled so much that it was hard for him to reach out to his references. They asked for a formal application, which they sent to him online and it took him three days to get it back to them.

Even though they had discussed compensation and territory, when it came to us asking Joe that, since it looked like they were going to make him an offer, he stated that, “Well, let’s see the offer in writing.” We then began to tell the hiring authority that we were getting a little nervous about this. Joseph let us all to believe that he had every intention of taking the job but when details started coming along he got squishy.

Our hiring authority explained that her upper management really liked the guy and felt like he could do a lot for the company and they were going to go through with the offer as discussed. Even she was beginning to get negative feelings about the whole thing because when she had to call the candidate, at his request, to discuss a number of things he wanted to talk about, he became real hard to get. As before, he would never pick up the phone when he was called and more often than not called back a day later.

The hiring authority explained very clearly that these offer letters were signed by the CEO and the company did not normally change anything in them. Before Joseph even got the offer letter he started asking me about their flexibility on a number of things. I called the hiring authority about them, reinforcing again that we were getting less and less confident in the candidate.

By this time, the company sent the written offer and Joseph started dissecting it. At this point, he told me that he wanted to do the deal but he wanted a number of things changed. I explained to him that it had come to the point where he was going to have to speak to the hiring authority himself and that the company was getting a little fed up with his negotiation style. His comment was, “well, that’s negotiations.” The hiring authority tried to reach out to Joseph two more times. He didn’t return her calls.

Joseph did call me and implied that if they could change just a couple of things he’d probably do the deal. I told him that he would have to speak to the hiring authority, but all of us were getting very dubious of his intentions. I suggested that they meet face-to-face. Joseph said that he couldn’t meet until a particular day. I passed that along to the hiring authority. He said he could meet at any time that day. I picked the time that was good for the hiring authority and when I passed it along to him…guess what? He writes back and says that he can’t do that particular time.

At this point, the hiring authority is pissed off. Although she said it’s going to be a little embarrassing to explain to her higher-ups that Joseph won’t be joining, she couldn’t imagine working with someone this way.

The offer was verbally rescinded through me. The candidate called the hiring authority and left a rather weak message that it probably would not have worked out anyhow.

Even if the candidate didn’t want to do this deal and it was pretty apparent that he didn’t, he shouldn’t have “managed” the process this way. He certainly closed the door for this organization for the future.

This is a great lesson of how not to negotiate.

Well, just this week we had a wonderful candidate get rejected for a position because he blew the test. I’ll tell you what happened after we discuss how to take tests. Unfortunately he just didn’t listen to our teaching.

First, whatever you do, don’t bitch and moan to the prospective employer that testing is a lot of nonsense. In some cases, it very well is, but if a prospective employer does it as a routine part of the selection process, your opinion isn’t going to matter. If you voice your negative opinion too much, you’ll be eliminated for that reason alone. So, just decide to take the test in stride and resolve to do the very best you can. And, don’t say something stupid like, “Oh, my God, I’m absolutely awful when it comes to test.” This may be true, but for goodness sake, don’t tell that to a prospective employer.

Second, before you take the test, get lots of rest, eat a good meal, and relax. Do the very best you can. Look at it as a challenge. Take it in stride. Trying to prepare for a test is hard, but there is a bit of salvation. Find out what kind of test you are going to be taking. Is it an intelligence test, a personality test, etc.? You might even be able to get the name of the test before you take it. This can be valuable because if it is a test that you might be able to find online, you can practice taking it. For instance, the Wonderlic test is used to measure how quickly a person thinks. A person can buy the test online and take it….as many times as they want. It’s one of those kinds of tests where the score can be improved upon rather drastically with practice. Certain types of sales personality tests can be mastered by doing the same thing. So, if you find out about the testing early enough and find out what kind of test it is going to be, you may very well be able to improve your score by practicing.

If the test is either paper and pencil or taken online do not be over analytical and agonize over each answer, nor be flippant about the answers that you give. Be thoughtful in your answers and above all be consistent in your answers. Don’t try to read into every question what the interviewer is trying to get at. That is a losing proposition.

Whatever you do, do not try to outguess the test! Don’t sit there and ask yourself, “What are they trying to find out when they asked that question? Because if they’re trying to find out ‘that’ then I will answer ‘this” so they will think ‘that’ when I answer ‘this’ so they will think ‘that’ of me,” you’re finished. Every one of these kinds of tests ask the same question in three or four different ways. No one is good enough to outguess them. Besides when people try to outguess the test their scores are usually so goofy they invalidate the whole thing. You’re finished!

If you have to do any kind of testing at all, practice if you can and relax …take it in stride.

So, what’s with this? Our client is a nine person IT consulting firm. They do project consulting for a very niche market. The CEO, whom I’ve known for 15 years while he was working his way up through the ranks of project consulting at a couple of national firms, founded this company a few years ago and looked for a salesperson on their own for two months and never even interviewed one candidate.

Their technical consultants are really doing most of their selling now and they don’t really have a pure salesperson. They have a quasi-salesperson doing the job, but he has turned out to be nothing but an order taker. He emails and waits for RFP requests. It’s got everybody frustrated and that’s why they need a new salesperson.

When the CEO called to tell us what he was looking for, he made it very specific that he really wanted to find somebody from a competitor and someone who was very used to calling on and selling IT consulting services to the very narrow sector that they sell to. We recruited really hard… I mean really hard. But it turns out that everyone who sells into that particular vertical sells their projects a year or two in advance, and if they are any good at all they have a lot of money coming to them over the next few years. They have the attitude that, “I’ve already made that money and there’s no real good reason for me to leave what I’m doing. We talked to, or communicated with, 25 or 26 people like this and no one was even interested in speaking with our client.

Out of sheer luck, we came up with a candidate who had actually been selling software into the vertical that these people were selling consulting services into. He has a tremendous track record of success and knows many of the people our client was looking to sell to. He didn’t know as many as our client would have liked, but in that particular vertical, people know people who know people and getting into other organizations would not be hard, especially for this stellar candidate, who had proven he knew how to do that.

We started the interviewing process and although the candidate, being a good salesperson, “qualified” everyone he spoke to into agreeing that he had the ability to do what they wanted done, they still decided not to hire him. As a group, they came up with very nebulous reasons in the final analysis, like “He really didn’t know our solution and wasn’t able to articulate it…. We aren’t sure his approach was what we would want… and, we just didn’t get the right feeling.”

It turns out that no one in the whole interviewing process wanted to make a commitment. Whenever a company is looking to replace the present employee there is always a thought in the back of their mind that, “The devil they know might be better than the devil they don’t know.” So, most everyone was reluctant to say, “This is our person.” They decided that the buck would stop with the managing director of this particular department. It turns out that the managing director even admitted that he had never been in sales and really wasn’t quite sure what it took. It was going to be obvious to him and to others if they found someone with exactly the experience, i.e. from a competitor, they were looking for. And, since they had been already looking for so long (the sunk cost fallacy) they were going to hold off and find someone who everybody would agree on.

I don’t know whether to feel more sorry for the company or our candidate. Anyone objectively looking at the guy and what the company does based on his superb track record, would know, beyond a doubt that this guy would’ve been very successful.

The majority of the people that interviewed this fellow really had nothing to do with sales. The company simply felt they needed lots of people to agree. Nobody wanted to make a stand, including a person who admitted that they really didn’t know anything about “sales.” Even the CEO didn’t want to go against his subordinate’s ambivalence.

Here are the lessons:

1. Whenever an employee is being “replaced,” a candidate better be aware that it’s going to be harder than it looks. People doing the interviewing and hiring may not know exactly what they need but they are always afraid of “the devil they don’t know.” So unless “Mr. or Ms. Perfect” hits them in the face, they’re going to have a tough time making a positive decision.
2. The longer the interviewing and hiring process goes on, the harder it is for a company to hire someone. It’s easy to interview a lot of people. Interviewing does not take “making a commitment.” But hiring someone does. Dating a lot of people is easy to do, but marrying someone requires a commitment! After a long period of interviewing, people start thinking, “Well this last person we interviewed wasn’t any better than the first person we interviewed… or second, or third… and we didn’t hire them, so we probably shouldn’t hire this one.”
3. The more people there are involved in the interviewing process, the less effective it is and the more likely no one is going to want to commit to hiring someone for fear that they’ll hear, “Well, he/she failed and you are the one that really wanted to hire them.”
4. The more people who are involved in the interviewing process who really don’t have anything to do with the job itself, the less likely they are to know what they’re doing or know what they’re looking for. They have been interjected into the interviewing process because, “We don’t want to make a mistake” and “We think that the more people who are involved in the interviewing process, the less likely we are to make a mistake.”
5. If people say “no” to a candidate no one will ever know whether they were right or not. If they make a commitment of, “Yes, we should hire him/her” and it doesn’t work out, they look foolish (or at least think they do). So, it’s simply easier and, more importantly, safer, to say “no.”

So, if you are a job seeker and you find yourself in a situation like this, be prepared for an uphill battle.

hardly a week goes by that at least 10 or 15 of our candidates are asked to take some kind of test… These things can range anywhere from IQ tests, psychological tests, math aptitude tests, personality surveys and so on. We’re constantly asked if there are any “secrets” to doing well on them.

The concept of testing intelligence was first successfully devised by a French psychologist  in the early 1900s to help describe differences in how well and quickly children learn at school.  Thus began the argument that continues today between those that believe  testing is an indication of a lot of things and those that believe  that testing  really can’t measure much of anything.

Since 1973, I’ve seen candidate testing ebb and flow in popularity. Believe it or not, it seems to ebb and flow depending on the economy. Testing of job candidates can be very expensive, so it’s one of the first things that companies stop doing when the economy gets difficult.

Job candidates  should be prepared for what I call the “paradox of testing.” Every company that has ever used testing as part of its selection process is going to tell every candidate that at most the test accounts for only 25% of the final decision. Don’t believe a word of it! Whatever kind of test that is used, from grafoanalisis  to psychological or psychiatric interviewing, is a qualifier that you must pass with the minimum standard arbitrarily set by someone or some group in the organization or you aren’t going to go further in the interviewing process. Whether hiring authorities are companies will admit it or not, the test becomes a binary, black and white, proceed or go home qualifier. Don’t let anybody tell you differently.

So, when a hiring authority tell you something like, “oh, by the way, we have some psychological (or aptitude, or skills, or intelligence)  testing you need to do as a candidate, but don’t worry about it. Everybody comes to work here has to take it and it really doesn’t account for much more than 10% (or 25% or 50%) of the decision,” don’t believe a word of it! Testing becomes the gate that has to be passed through before you can be considered as a viable candidate.

Testing objectifies the hiring process. When supposedly objective tests decide on your viability as a candidate, no hiring or interviewing authority involved in the process of hiring has to have her butt on the line, has to take a stand  on your candidacy,  or has to run the risk of being the only person who likes you and wants to hire you. Now a hiring authority is still going to have to make a decision in choosing someone to be hired. But the convenient thing about testing is that it also functions as a cover your butt issue.. If hiring you turns out to be a mistake, but you did well on the company’s battery of tests, the hiring authority can turn to everyone else and say, “well, she did well on the testing!” It’s just another way of passing the buck of responsibility. The test becomes the qualifier, screening out tons of candidates should know one person has to and it’s convenient and easy.

Please don’t tell me that testing is stupid and it doesn’t work. Part of my graduate studies-admittedly more than 47 years ago-included extensive studies about testing. I can make the case that testing will never measure passion, commitment, focus, and, in general “heart,” the real things it separated top performer from an average one. But as you know, the people who manage companies don’t really care what you or I think. If somebody sells a company on the idea that any kind of testing will help it hire better people in the company invests thousands in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars in this testing, it’s going to use it-no matter what.

—–next week—does testing work?