Job Search Solution Blog by Tony Beshara

My candidate had an absolutely excellent track record. He had 15 years of excellent performance in three different firms, had left them for very good reasons and was going to make some company a real winner. Admittedly, he hadn’t interviewed for a job for quite a long time and agreed that he had to practice. Interviewing does not come naturally and, unfortunately, companies and the people in them make decisions about the candidate’s ability to do the job based on their ability to interview. (A discussion for another time)

I try to reinforce to each candidate that I work with, especially when I get them an interview to make sure that they come up with at least one or two stories that communicate how good they really are. Unfortunately, I made the assumption that this guy was so good he wouldn’t have any problem coming up with the story and, even though I do with most candidates, I didn’t question him about the story he was going to tell. He had so many successes in his career, I was certain he would do fine.

Unfortunately, he assumed he would do fine and did not practice telling the story. So, when one of my clients asked him to tell a story about one of his successes, in short, he blew it. According to my client, who was the interviewing authority, he rambled so long in the story he chose to tell it became hard for the hiring authority to follow it. He got lost in the story . . . literally lost. He said, “I really loved this guy until he started telling the story. I asked a few more questions but I’m still not clear what his story was about.”

Our client is still going to consider the guy. But to make matters even worse, the “punchline” of the story was that the candidate wasn’t successful in making the sale of the story he told. Basically, he told an elongated story that was hard to follow and the end was a defeat or, at least a disappointment. In other words, it was a terrible story choice.

The impact of stories is phenomenal. People always remember stories, but the stories need to be GOOD!   They need to be long enough to be memorable but short enough to maintain attention, while displaying a positive outcome. Stories need to be practiced to the point that they literally roll off the tongue and have a phenomenal impact.

Our candidate, is now aware and prepared for the next interview with an effective and memorable story.

Develop your storytelling skills to elevate your interview from good to great by connecting with the hiring authority, and leaving a positive impression.

I’ve been listening to as well as reading Ryan Holiday’s book Discipline is Destiny. Every employer and every employee in the country should be required to read this book.  It has baffled me why 4 million people, according to a number of authorities, just plain dropped out of the workforce. Some say it is the result of “long Covid,” some say it’s the result of the government paying people not to work.

My sense, having been doing what I do since 1973, is that this is been coming for a long time. For many years, the baby boomer generation has been fighting for jobs. Our generation was led by countless leaders who built companies around their own discipline that infected other people. We were the “pig in the Python” for numbers of people in the job market. For 20 to 25 years competition for jobs was great. Every one of us knew that there were at least two people who wanted our job if we quit or got fired. But now 2.3 million of those boomers retired early.

And as a result, the attitude towards work by the majority of present workers (and I talked to at least 25 or 30 people a day) is just different. Over the years people have gone from an attitude of “we” to an attitude of “me.” Everything from the government reinforcing people not to work to “I want to work from home and that’s all there is to it”, we have lost prior work regimented discipline. I’m asked by more and more candidates, even with 15 and 20 years of experience, “what are the benefits?” “What is the PTO policy?” “How flexible are the hours?” “I have to drive more than 30 minutes, and you expect me to do that?”

What Holiday’s book does is remind us of all of the discipline that numerous leaders of the world have had. He also reminds us that they were not perfect people. In fact they were hardly perfect at all. He reminds us of the many personal challenges they had as well as their many sins. The lessons are abundantly clear.

Self-Discipline:

• Gives employees strength to endure with difficult clients/coworkers

• Catapults workers from satisfactory to tremendous performers

• Helps employees set goals and career direction

We all have challenges, we all fall but it is self-discipline that enables people to persist until they reach their goals.

Unfortunately, I don’t see as much self-discipline and people as I think there used to be. For example, those 4 million people that have simply dropped out of the workforce, where is their self-discipline? I’m not talking about a self-discipline like a Tom Brady or Lebron James. I’m simply talking about the self-discipline of willingness to work, willingness to apply yourself, willingness to really try.

What happened to workplace self-discipline?

The holidays are among us, that said . . . . Happy Thanksgiving!

Being in the “people business” for over 44 years and dealing with both demanding issues of a business as well as rewarding experiences of running a business, I am convinced that it all boils down to having a proper attitude. With an “attitude of gratitude” one is able to manage life and work a lot easier with more grace, than those who view everything as a blessing or a calamity.

My best friend of 50 years and rugby buddy, Greg Lane recently shared with Chrissy, my wife, a great approach to just about everything should be to, “pause, pray and proceed”.  Often we get emotionally wrapped around the axle about all kinds of things that either happen to us or don’t happen for us.  We fret and fear the worst, especially stuff we cannot control.

In fact, psychologists tell us that 98% of the stuff that folks worry about they cannot control.

An attitude of gratitude, if you practice it long enough, instructs us to be grateful for every situation, even those we do not like.  That said, in a market as we are experiencing today, strength to endure inflation, lay-offs, and a probable looming recession is vital.

Therefore, if you are searching for a job or next career opportunity (which is our common theme on this blog) make an effort to face the rejections, the refusals, and the denials with as much grace as possible.  Being grace filled, is the main tip that will ultimately help you to be both mentally and emotionally strong enough to withstand the difficult seasons with thankfulness.

Please visit our sites to view your available positions https://www.babich.com/ or  https://lnkd.in/gGceS3nD

There is one constant conundrum in the profession of a recruiter as well as for our clients and our candidates. It is the problem of having too many jobs in a short period of time as part of your career history.  We’ve known some organizations that consider more than two jobs in five years to be excessive. Most people would agree that three jobs in three years is problematic. A hiring authority and his or her company are looking to minimize risk. A candidate with three jobs in three years is considered a risk. Most hiring authorities assume that, no matter what the reasons, a candidate with that kind of record is only going to be with their company for three years.

Candidates with short tenure will always have “reasons” for why they left or were forced to leave. Some are more valid than others. Some of our clients simply won’t, under any circumstances interview a candidate who has had three jobs in three years. I understand.

However, the truth is that the complication of business has rapidly changed over the years. Companies are more fluid than they have ever been… Ever!

Consider the following facts:

• In 1973 (the year that I got in this profession) the average company in the United States was 59 years old.

• In 2012 the average company in the United States was 15 years old.

• In 2014 the average company in the United States was 12 years old.

• The average turnover rate of a survey of 40,000 businesses in the United States was 15% 

• Average turnover rate for small businesses was close to 20%

• The average job in United States lasts 2.5 years

Think about it. Businesses come and go faster than they ever have and the turnover rate is as great as it’s ever been.

One of our hiring authorities, Danny, stated he just didn’t want to see any candidates that had more than two jobs in the last three years. Danny said that they would be with him for about that amount of time and he just wouldn’t interview anybody like that. He stated that he was 55 years old and it only had two jobs in the last 25 years. He couldn’t understand why people these days would have so many different jobs in short periods of time. In other words, why weren’t more people like Danny? Well, Danny was a performer but he was also lucky!

I explained to him the above statistics. Companies come and go faster than they ever have. The candidate whose company got bought, shutdown or merged may be a really good employee. His or her reasons for leaving the job may not have anything to do with them, but the company that they were working for. Twitter, for instance would be a great example of turbulent work environment, as of today, that may cause a job change.  Danny reflected for a moment and admitted that his company, a few years earlier, had bought another company and laid off 60% of the people in that company because there was a duplication of jobs.

Danny and all of the other hiring authorities out there with the same mentality might want to reconsider a candidate’s “too many jobs.” To eliminate a candidate without investigating as to exactly the reasons for the job instability is not only unfair to the candidate but shortsighted on the part of the hiring authority.

“Too many jobs” is relative. Just because a candidate has had three jobs in three years doesn’t mean that he or she would be on their next job for only one year. The important thing to do is investigate thoroughly the reasons the candidate left the jobs. Dig deep, check references thoroughly. You may end up eliminating the candidate with too many jobs but at least you’ve given yourself, and him or her, the benefit of the doubt. Giving people a benefit of doubt allows for the discovery of real gems for the company.

Our software client had four regional sales reps in North Texas up until 12 months ago. They push their people pretty hard and the VP is a “my way or the highway” type of guy. He’s been with them for 10 years and worked his way up. He is a pretty good guy and certainly knows his company and products very well. He’s not particularly fun to work for and he lets people know he’s the one on “top of the heap” and as long as you perform, he’s your distant friend, but a bit of a solipsis.

Two of the company’s salespeople really were not doing all that well so about a year ago they left. The company was in the middle of being sold to a larger organization so management decided to postpone hiring until they had been integrated with the newer company. At least that was their excuse for not hiring. With the new company came a “reorganization” of the sales effort into more of a “team” approach. This team approach would have a sales team led by more of a client/delivery type person, one salesperson and two consultants. (Not a particularly efficient sales model.)

The hiring process now became that the client/delivery manager, who was never really a salesperson, would start the interviewing process with the candidate and then move the candidate along to the consultants who would interview, then to the VP,  (all video interviews) then a group interview with all of the same people and the one candidate. As with all processes like this the “planning fallacy” applies… things always take longer and are always more expensive than you think they’re going to be.   The client/delivery manager was a nice enough guy and pretty much past every candidate on to the next level. But organizing everybody else took an average of at least three weeks.

What the company was looking for in a candidate was hard enough to find, but between the VPs hard-nosed “now this is the way it is” rather adversarial interview, organizing everybody to be able to meet as a group and the relative disaster of group interviews, in the last six months they had initially interviewed six of our candidates, lost four  because they’re interviewing process took too long, and eliminated two at the last step of the group interview because everyone in the group could not come to a “yeah, we really want to hire this person” conclusion. They didn’t really dislike the candidates but they couldn’t come to an overwhelming “yes.”  (This kind of thing happens more often than not with group type interviews.)

In the meantime, the two salespeople that were still there didn’t like the new management matrix, so they left the company over the past two weeks. So, there is now a $5 million territory with no salespeople in it at all. Everybody in the organization is pointing fingers at everyone else.

The VP decides that he’s going to take control and do what they should’ve done to begin with, have him initiate the first interview, pass the candidate along to the group and do it within three or four days, get the groups input but not have them in essence, “vote” on the candidate. If the candidate passes this test, the VP simply decides.

Now, we have just started this new process, but it is guaranteed to work a whole lot more efficiently. Even the candidates that we have found for them this past week are asking why it is taken so long for them to find salespeople. One of the candidates we have presented told me that he had heard about this opportunity six months ago and he’s anxious to hear “what’s wrong.”

I’m sure this will work out all right, because these really are good people. They are just what Teilhard de Chardin called, “spiritual beings acting human.”

Most people think that our biggest challenge as recruiters is with our candidates. It’s not! 60% of our challenges are with our clients. Most companies and the people in them don’t really like to admit that they create their own problems with the processes they come up with to protect themselves from hiring the wrong people.  But they get in their own way.

In spite of what people might be reading in the newspaper, really good candidates are hard to find. The longer the interviewing and hiring process takes and the more convoluted it becomes the harder it is to fill positions.

The lesson, as we have preached ad infinitum is to: keep the interview process simple… only involve the people whose livelihood depends on the candidate/prospective employee’s performance (no more than three, may be at the most four)…and do it quickly.

I probably experience a story like this at least once a month. Keep in mind, I’m only one recruiter and even though I’m far beyond average, I still only experience a very minute group of hiring processes. The reason I bring this up is that when I saw this story unfold over the last few months I wondered how many millions of times this kind of thing happens. So here’s the story:

Seven months ago, John, the regional manager of a multibillion-dollar company had one of his better people retire. So, John started looking for her replacement. He rather quickly found a really good candidate but his hiring process wound up taking close to six weeks and the candidate found another job. So John started again. We got involved in the situation at this time and encourage John to find two or three great candidates and take them all through the process at the same time realizing, especially since his interviewing process was so long, that he was likely to lose at least one along way. He assured us, that after last situation he would move the process much more quickly. (That’s what they all say.)

But he didn’t. And on top of that, one of the people that he had hired last January that has turned out to be a “bust,” according to him because the employee just simply can’t or won’t get in front of enough customers, so he’s had to put that person on a plan. He is now going to have two openings.  So the pressure is now more intense.

Instead of shepherding two or three candidates through the process, John fell back on his old habit of picking one candidate and taking one candidate at a time through his process.

The process was:

• First: The initial interview with John

• Second: The candidate would meet with one of the candidate’s potential peers (which took a week)

• Third: The candidate would need to meet with two of John’s peers in different parts of the country, and for some reason they insisted that candidate meet with both of these people at the same time via a Teams interview, which meant they had to coordinate convenient times for the two managers to be available at the same time.  The first time they coordinated a meeting one of the managers had to cancel, so they had to coordinate another meeting.  All of this took another three weeks.

• Forth: The candidate would have to meet with John’s boss, the vice president.

Obviously, no one’s gotten to the forth point in this search.

Fortunately, the one candidate was still available. Unfortunately, one of the interviewing managers could only be on the call for 30 minutes and didn’t like the candidate because the candidate just didn’t seem “energetic enough.” (How you can tell that in a 30 minute Teams interview, I have no idea.) It goes without saying that the candidate’s track record was really good, but as so often happens. People evaluate a candidate based on how they interview instead of their track record. (Yes, even in just 30 minutes.) John just didn’t feel comfortable in pushing the candidate through at the objection of one of his peers, so now he had to start all over. It bears mentioning that, when John hired the employee who he has to put on plan, he respectfully “overrode” one of the objections of one of his peers. This fact came out when we were arranging the peer interviews for the new candidate.  Obviously, John was not as likely to “override” one of his peer’s opinions again because it doesn’t look great the last time he did it.

It was the end of the quarter, so John had to spend two weeks helping his people close deals and couldn’t interview. After those two weeks, he started interviewing again. And, so that is where we are now, we just started interviewing again.

Now, please understand that John is a 10 year experienced manager with more than 15 years in his business. He is really good at what he does. In fact, he’s a really good manager and one of the nicest people that you’d ever meet. Part of the problem is that his company, instead of just letting him interview and hire the way he used to, instituted a new process of interviewing and hiring to keep from making hiring “mistakes.” John has one of the best track records of hiring people in the whole company, he can’t very well buck a companywide process of hiring that is supposed to ensure success. They’d be better off to just leave John alone and let him manage his own region. But that ain’t going to happen.

As of this week, John is into his seventh month of trying to hire somebody. Within a couple weeks he’s going to be looking for two people.  And, obviously, the longer it goes the harder it gets. John’s lucky because he has a lot of credibility with his company. Most managers would be criticized for taking so long to hire. Most managers would appear to be incompetent and subtly questioned behind their back.

As I mentioned in the beginning, I report this situation because it happens a lot. People and companies are so afraid of making decisions that might turn out poorly they create nightmares for themselves. Nobody intentionally does this, but that’s what happens.

It’s really hard for most people to imagine how many times this kind of thing happens. It happens a lot. Most folks will never admit to stuff like this. Companies and the people in them should think about the cost of these processes as they invent them.