Tag: interview regulations

Career Strategies: The 5 Deadly Phrases To Avoid In The Job Interview Process

When it comes to the job interview process, whoever tells the best story wins. But certain phrases and ideas can short-circuit your career plans. Are you really able to have the kind of leadership conversation your job search deserves? When it comes to creating the career conversation that leads to consideration, avoid these five show-stoppers in the interview.

If you argue for your limitations, they are yours.

Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
  1. When Is Honesty NOT the Best Policy? – do you ever find yourself saying a version of this phrase: “If I’m being honest…”? TBH, that phrase is honestly hurting your chances in the interview process. Here’s why: if I need to call out the fact that I’m being honest right now, doesn’t it make you wonder if I’ve been honest with you up until this point? Why did I wait until now to get real and spill the T? Actually, in the interview, honesty is the only policy that works. Highlighting the fact that you are getting to the truth, but only just right now, can arouse suspicion and make people wonder why you aren’t full-on honest all the time. If you are a person of integrity, honesty is your default setting. Don’t create unnecessary suspicion. “To be honest…” is a filler phrase – like “umm” “Uh…” and “like”. None of those fillers are very satisfying in the job interview. So be really honest with yourself, and leave out the words that don’t serve you.
  2. The Fault Line – don’t cross it. “It was her fault” is the kind of blamestorming that can take you out of the running. Why? Because companies hire people who can overcome limiting circumstances. People are imperfect, nobody has a team of 100% superstars and circumstances often create difficulties in the office (that’s why it’s called work). How did you get past the obstacles and limitations – even if one of those obstacles was Jessica in Accounting? Phrases that blame people and situations point out your own limitations – what you couldn’t tolerate, tackle or transform. Focus on the story of how you overcame challenges, how you helped others to be better, or how you picked up the ball when somebody else dropped it. Remember, other people don’t need to be bad in order for you to be good. Concentrate on how you solve real problems – including personnel problems – by taking responsibility instead of laying blame.
  3. What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You – do you know how to answer an interview question where the answer is, “I don’t know” or “No, I don’t have that skill”? The fact is, no one can know everything. And not everything can be googled. Saying “I don’t know” isn’t a phrase that can NEVER hurt you – because it’s an honest and real response! The phrase that’s really dangerous? Trying to fake it until you make it! Don’t create a fiction around your skill set, ever. Any phrase that feels like fiction is one you’ve got to avoid.
  4. Disconnection is Deadly – Considering questions about skills or experiences you don’t have: are you able to connect your interviewer to a relatable topic – something that you do know, that might be supportive or helpful? For example, if the CIO says, “Do you have Salesforce Administrator Certification?” and you don’t, what do you do? Do you just say, “Nope!” blink twice and wait for your next mistake? Find a phrase that pays by connecting to what you do have: skills, talents and desire for the role! Point out the other experience or to action you can take to get what’s needed. “I don’t have the Admin certification but I went to Dreamforce [the company’s major annual conference] the last two years in a row. I’m very familiar with the software – let me share with you the experience I have and my training so far. If that certification is important, I can put together a plan to gain that credential in short order. Do you think that plan would be a requirement if I were to get this role?” Always connect your answers back to your interviewer, the company’s goals and your ability to work hard in the job – those things are always part of your story.
  5. Ultimatums – an ultimatum is a statement of what you won’t tolerate, usually phrased as a demand. Ultimatums reflect terms that you will or won’t accept, period. By definition, ultimatums point to your lack of flexibility and adaptability (two characteristics that might be useful for a new hire, wouldn’t you agree? Why would you demonstrate that you lack these two key qualities?) Now some ultimatums are important: “I won’t tolerate racism on my team”, for example, points to your beliefs and values. But “I won’t work on weekends” or “I need every Thursday afternoon off, or I can’t work here” is really pointing out your limitations. Look for phrases like “I can’t accept _______”, “I won’t allow that” or “That just won’t work for me.” Because if it won’t work for you, maybe you won’t work for this company. Every job interview is a negotiation. Once you get to “yes” you can decide if you want to take the job or not. You’re in the interview to explore your options – why start cutting yourself off from possibilities? Does it help your career to present demands and requirements, or are there other ways of looking at the situation? Is your ultimatum a personal preference that you’re clinging to, like a security blanket, or a statement of your integrity, values and work ethic? It’s better to keep your options open if you really want the job. Know the difference between uncompromising values and limiting statements that knock you out of the running. Keep your options open. Find out what’s really on offer and make a business decision to see if it fits for you. Ultimately, what you will and won’t accept is your decision, but arriving at that place without ultimatums is a smart way to frame the conversation.

The best interview is the most authentic, where you speak from your heart about the solution you can provide. By creating a dialogue with your interviewer, you build the conversation that matters most in your career. Don’t short-circuit your skills with ultimatums, filler phrases or fear of the unknown. The interview process is a journey of discovery. Your story – and the way you tell it – will guide you towards your next destination.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Chris Westfall

I write about the changing nature of the leadership conversation, and how communication creates the connections that matter. Recognized as the U.S. National Elevator Pit…

Source: Career Strategies: The 5 Deadly Phrases To Avoid In The Job Interview Process

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“Tell me about a difficult situation or challenge you faced in a workplace” By asking this question, employers are trying to see how you (A) take charge in handling a challenging situation, or (B) collaborate with your coworkers as a team to solve a conflict. They want to know if you have critical thinking and problem solving skill, how you approach the problem and the level of responsibility you take in challenging situations. It is very important to make sure that you use an example that demonstrates your ability to handle difficult situation. So do not mention about when you elevated the responsibility. Rather, talk about times when you stepped up and took a leadership position by collaborating with your coworkers. In order to construct effective story, use PAR model and follow the 3 steps. 1 Problem: Identify the problem. What was the issue? 2 Action: How did you and your coworkers analyzed the problem and took actions to solve the issue? 3 Result: What was the positive outcome in result of the action? By following PAR model, you can frame your story well. Watch the video to see example answer and start constructing your answer. Jobspeaker is a FREE service to help job seekers find better jobs. Login today!

Category

People & Blogs

Inside the Shady New World of Fake Resumes, Professional Interviewees, and Other Job-Seeker Scams

A few years ago, Daniel Zubairi caught a job applicant in a flagrant lie. The woman’s résumé said she worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That didn’t sound right. Zubairi’s Bethesda, Maryland-based cybersecurity company, SydanTech, worked closely with NOAA–and Zubairi had never heard of her.

As it happened, Zubairi was at the agency’s offices during the woman’s phone interview. He asked to meet her in person. “Sir,” she said, “I’d like to end the interview now.” Click. Zubairi ran a background check. She was a home nursing assistant.

Job seekers have been fudging their accomplishments forever. But founders across the country say they’ve lately seen a surge of incidents that take job-applicant fakery to new–and shadier–levels. Totally false résumés featuring fictional employers. Professional interviewees. Covert coaching of candidates with no experience.

The stories have spread virally among business leaders. A CEO has a suspicious experience. She talks to another CEO, who says he’s heard similar stories. At a meetup of 50 CEOs this past summer, Zubairi shared his story. “Everyone agreed that they’ve seen something to that effect,” says Ahmed R. Ali, founder of the Rockville, Maryland-based Tista Science and Technology Corporation, who was in the room.

Hirer Beware
Tips for weeding out fraudulent job applicants
1. Request references from every applicant.
2. Contact hiring managers at previous employers.
3. Do background checks–expensive but worth it.
4. Ask granular questions about skills and former jobs.
5. Give everyone a skills test.

Zubairi and his peers have identified a growing problem, one that’s been largely unreported. It starts with low unemployment–now at its lowest since 1969. A tight labor market can be especially tricky for fast-growing startups. (SydanTech, No. 78 on this year’s Inc. 5000, certainly qualifies.) An imbalance of available talent and a company’s needs can send a dangerous message: These guys are desperate to fill seats.

Zubairi says he’s now caught multiple applicants in similar lies, and even identified a SydanTech employee who successfully faked his interview and worked at the company for nine months–before being caught and fired. Cybersecurity firms are especially vulnerable: The industry’s unemployment rate has been near zero since 2016. And many of Zubairi’s available jobs pay a minimum of $120,000 per year.

Cybersecurity is far from the only field affected. About the same time as Zubairi’s first encounter, Biju Kurian was in Oklahoma City, running Objectstream, an aviation IT company. (“We make flying safe,” he says.) Objectstream is also growing quickly–No. 2,992 on this year’s Inc. 5000–in a lucrative field with a talent gap. Kurian’s problem:

A woman who’d impressed over the phone had a different voice when she arrived for her first day, and seemed unfamiliar with the conversation they’d had. Eventually, he confronted her. She broke down, confessed, apologized, and quit on the spot.

On the surface, these appear to be candidates taking desperate measures. But the candidates themselves may not be the only ones at fault. As recruitment has migrated online and become automated, says Ben Zhao, a University of Chicago professor who studies online market­places, opportunities for scammers have arisen.

Profes­sional recruiters, who get placement fees when they land candidates in jobs, have a clear incentive to game the system, Zhao says. They are “middlemen who can make significant profit by misrepresenting clients.”

They might hire professional interviewees to do phone interviews, or feed answers to inexperienced candidates in real time. Or they might fake client résumés to make them look better to hiring algorithms–sometimes without telling those clients.

Michael Mathews, founder of Toledo, Ohio-based automotive recruiting firm Moxee, estimates that as many as 20 percent of recruiters are at least dabbling in such tactics. “It doesn’t surprise me anymore,” he says.

Zubairi thinks he’s found a way to screen some fakes. After his CEO meetup, he downloaded résumés submitted to SydanTech through the job site Indeed–and found dozens of near-identical documents. They bore the same formatting, titles, and job descriptions, down to the word. The only differences: the names of the applicants and the companies they claimed to have worked for. (Indeed declined to comment, but Inc. reviewed a selection of these documents.)

One common name on many of the dubious résumés: the Nigbel Group, whose bare-bones website describes it as an IT company in Houston. Zubairi says he’s called its phone number and nobody has ever picked up. Nigbel did not respond to multiple Inc. requests for comment, nor is it listed in the Texas Secretary of State’s database of taxable entities. To Mathews, the company sounds strikingly similar to fictional businesses he’s seen created by other recruiters to help punch up fake résumés.

In an age of digitally driven misinformation, perhaps it’s not surprising that fake job applicants would surge. As with other online-marketplace scams–say, counterfeit goods on Amazon–startups are more vulnerable than larger companies, simply because they have less money for prevention. “Smaller companies that don’t have resources will continue to be defrauded by these attackers,” predicts Zhao. And tech platforms will continue to play catchup with their hijackers.

By: Cameron Albert-Deitch Reporter, Inc. @c_albertdeitch

Source: Inside the Shady New World of Fake Resumes, Professional Interviewees, and Other Job-Seeker Scams

1.54K subscribers
An unfortunate reality is that of scam artists or con artists, and they can appear when we least expect them. We see con artists depicted in Hollywood movies and TV. We hear of various scams on the news. One type of scam that is becoming more common is the Job Scam. So, how can you identify if a job is legitimate or a scam? Here are my top 8 tips: 1. Immediate Offer – if you are given an offer without as much as an interview. 2. Interview via IM – employers typically conduct interviews, but legitimate employers do not use Instant Messenger to interview. 3. Poor Spelling & Grammar in Job Ad – this refers to obvious spelling and grammar mistakes. 4. E-mail Address – the email address should be professional and include the company name (not Gmail, yahoo, live, etc.). 5. Asks You to Pay – legitimate employers will never ask you to transfer money to them for any reason. 6. Personal Info – this is a tricky one. Although you will need to send your personal details eventually to an employer as per their background check process, be wary of any websites to which you need to upload your personal information. It should be an https address (the “s” stands for secure). 7. Bank Details – again, legitimate employers will need your banking details in order to pay you. Be wary if a prospective employer asks for additional banking information, such as the answers to your security questions or for your PIN number. 8. Intuition – trust your intuition. If you believe a job might be a scam, be sure to proceed with extra caution and do your research! What to do if you Suspect a Job is a Scam? For every role, it is highly recommended that you conduct thorough research on the organization and on the people with whom you will be meeting. That said, some of the savvier scam artists have “borrowed” LinkedIn profiles of legitimate people. Be sure to take note of the LinkedIn profile to see how many connections a person has (i.e. do they have any connections? Is the profile complete?). If you do suspect that you have been contacted by a job scammer, be sure to report it to the local police, or in Canada to the RCMP’s fraud unit. Finally, be sure to share your experience with others and share this video. The more we are aware of these types of scams and are able to help others identify them, all ships will float higher. If you would like personalized advice, you can find me on http://www.jobhuntsolutions.com or if you have any questions, you can leave a comment below, or contact me here: Email: nicole@jobhuntsolutions.com Website: http://www.jobhuntsolutions.com Twitter: @ recruitmentcoach LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/job-… Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jobhuntsolut… Until next time, happy hunting!

Category

Education

22 Ways To Completely Ruin Any Chance Of Succeeding In Your Interview

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You always read about what you ought to do in an interview. I thought it might be even more helpful to share some blunders that you should avoid throughout the interview process. If you do engage in these actions, I can guarantee that you’ll epically fail and enrage the interviewers. You’ll probably also be barred from ever interviewing there again.

  • Offer available times to interview that are solely convenient for you. You don’t care if its burdensome to the interviewers, as it’s all about you.
  • If it turns out that the time you confirmed is now inconvenient for you, cancel the meeting minutes before the interview is scheduled to start.
  • Show up late to the interview. Compound this by not offering any apologies as to why you’re late or asking forgiveness for making them wait 30 minutes for you.
  • As you arrive tardy, you are holding a Starbucks coffee and loudly slurping it in front of everyone.
  • It’s August in New York City and about 100 degrees on the trains. You don’t find it important to go to the bathroom and get freshened up—you just arrive disheveled and offer a sopping wet handshake.
  • Of course, you don’t have to bring a résumé or business card.
  • You call the hiring manager by the wrong name twice, after she has has already corrected you.
  • Your phone rings and your ringtone is a gangster rap song filled with profanity and inappropriate lyrics. You answer the call and put up your index finger, signaling the universal “I’ll be with you in a minute” sign. You then follow up with a “shush” when they’re talking too loudly and interfering with your call.  In fact, you look annoyed at them for looking annoyed at you.
  • As the interviewer asks questions, you look bored and apathetic—trying to play hard to get.
  • You provide answers to a question that wasn’t asked. When corrected, you admit that you weren’t paying attention to the question. In this moment, you think the interviewer will value your honesty.
  • Instead of giving concise answers, you try being different by offering awkwardly long and meandering soliloquies that confuse and annoy everyone.
  • You talk trash about your former employer and co-workers. You think they will love hearing about how terrible their competitors are and appreciate the juicy gossip.
  • You ask if it’s okay to date the boss, as you’ve done so in the past.
  • Before anything else, you demand to know the salary, bonus, where your office is located and how much vacation time and sick days you get, as well as other perks.
  • You are rude and dismissive to the receptionist in the lobby when she doesn’t let you in right away. You let her know important people are expecting you.
  • You take copious notes while everyone is talking and don’t look up at all while you are writing.
  • In the middle of the interview, while they are in the midst of asking you a question, interrupt precipitously and tell them you have a hard stop and need to go to another interview, which you’re already late for.
  • When the interviewer asks you a question, you sigh in annoyance and inquire, “Didn’t you read my résumé?”
  • You either avoid all eye contact or stare directly into their eyes for the entire duration of the interview.
  • If you’re bored, you fiddle with the objects on the interviewer’s desk and distractedly look around the room.
  • You constantly interrupt the interviewer with nonsensical questions.
  • Wrap up the interview by asking, “Are you going to give me an offer or what?”

While it may sound like I am exaggerating with these gaffes to humor you and make a point, you would be surprised to know that these are all real-life instances that I’ve encountered as an executive recruiter and hiring manager for my own team. I can tell you firsthand, if you exhibit any of these behaviors, I can assure you that you’ll totally flounder and sabotage your own chances of attaining a new job.

 

Jack Kelly

I am a CEO, founder, and executive recruiter at one of the oldest and largest global search firms in my area of expertise, and have personally placed thousands of professionals with top-tier companies over the last 20-plus years. I am passionate about advocating for job seekers. In doing so, I have founded a start-up company, WeCruitr, where our mission is to make the job search more humane and enjoyable. As a proponent of career growth, I am excited to share my insider interviewing tips and career advancement secrets with you in an honest, straightforward, no-nonsense and entertaining manner. My career advice will cover everything you need to know, including helping you decide if you really should seek out a new opportunity, whether you are leaving for the wrong reasons, proven successful interviewing techniques, negotiating a salary and accepting an offer and a real-world understanding of how the hiring process actually works. My articles come from an experienced recruiter’s insider perspective.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/

 

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