Are you recruitable?

Seven Things You Can and Should Control in the Short Term
(To Stay Recruitable)

1. Leaving Your Job –I talk with an awful lot of people who have gotten into a tough spot at work and decide to leave before they have another position. Avoid that! If you want to use a recruiter you will find that employers are reluctant to pay a fee for anyone out of work.

2. Tone of Your Search – Scuba divers are trained to swim away from someone who tries to grab their mouth piece. Like wise people will flee if you appear desperate during your job search.

3. Your Appearance – Who ever said “Don’t judge a book by its cover” never did much interviewing.

4. Tone of Your Conversation – Light and cheery is better than gloom and doom. Maybe you were a goth as a teenager, now is not the time to revisit that outlook.

5. Preparation for an Interview – A good recruiter can help you prepare mentally for the interview. You need to do your homework as well. Try to get the inside scoop from your recruiter on the depth of preparation that you need. Remember though, you need to be prepared to present yourself. The company knows a lot about itself already.

6. Brevity of Conversation – Stick to business. Many intelligent people are marvelous conversationalists, so marvelous that they come to the end of an interview and the company hasn’t answered the questions it needs to move to the next step. Guess who loses in that situation?

7. Punctuality – Be on time. Better yet, be a little early. This is a sign of respect. Delays do happen, and there are certainly circumstances where it is excusable. In a competition between two candidates of equal value, the punctual candidate always wins.

Seven Things you can’t Control

1. Your Interviewer’s Mood – Maybe she cracked a tooth this morning, or maybe she won the lottery. Your job is to roll with her mood (within reason).

2. The Stock Market – Many open positions are scuttled because of a bad quarter or a negative outlook. This is all the more reason to take opportunities seriously and to drive them to a conclusion as quickly as possible.

3. Cultural Fit – If you are a surfer at heart, but the company has a rigid outlook on business, you’ll discover this within the first interview. If there isn’t a good fit, it’s not going to be a good job for you.

4. Your Company’s Reputation – you may have been the star sales person at Enron, but your company’s reputation is going to follow you around. You may get the benefit of a doubt or maybe not.

5. Your company’s internal policies – some companies are thrilled to give their people million dollar commission checks, others readjust quotas quarterly to avoid ever doing that. It’s frustrating for top performers from less generous companies to interview, because so many companies tell their recruiters to look for numbers and consistency.

6. Your appearance – Yes. I know I said you could control it up above, but here’s what you can’t. May be you remind the interviewer of the school yard bully that made his life a living hell in 4th grade. Perhaps you’re too tan.

7. What others say – Some people like you, and some people don’t. Technically it’s illegal and actionable for a former employer or someone else who knows you to make a nasty comment. Practically, there is little chance that the employer will identify that person or even let on that you’ve gotten a poor reference.

Seven Things a Recruiter Looks for in a Candidate

It’s a little hard to generalize across so many different industries, and across so many different levels of the job market, but there are few general principles:

1. The “Magic Bullet” – A candidate who is a perfect fit for the requirements that the company specifies. An engineer with 10 years of experience in small motor design, who’s spent five years in Kuala Lumpur and understands the effects of high humidity at first hand.

People often laugh at the lists of requirements that a recruiter lays out for them, but it’s no laughing matter. That’s why the client is willing to pay a fee to a recruiter. The recruiter is paid to find a critical mass of qualifications before moving to the next step. If this is not the case a good recruiter will end the conversation right then and there and move on.

2. A Good Attitude – You may have had a hard time recently, you may have been cheated out of money, your spouse may have left you, and your attempt to become the southwestern chili champion may have ended in shame and lawsuits. IT DOESN’T MATTER. The recruiter is sizing you up to see if you can maintain a positive attitude throughout the interview process.

Candidates are sometimes shocked when a recruiter cools the conversation after within a few minutes. A short call often means the recruiter has detected a note of bitterness or sadness in your voice. You may feel you’re a good actor and can hide that, but I can tell you from personal experience on the other end of the phone, a negative or depressed attitude shines through.

I worked with a candidate who had a stellar sales history. He’d always made his quota, and usually exceeded it by a fair margin. Unfortunately, he’d gone to work for a small company that by his description had “forgotten” to pay him about $30,000 in commissions. Naturally, he felt bitter about the situation. The feedback from the client was – great guy, but we were put off by his attitude.

No one will pay a fee for a less than stellar attitude.

3. Good job tenure – Clients want to know that you are going to stay put for awhile if they hire you. No matter how qualified you are, if you’ve changed jobs every 18 months for the last 10 years, the client may not be willing to pay a fee for what they consider to be a long term hire. Conversely if you’ve been at just one company for many years, the client may worry that you will be a fish out of water.

4. Company pedigree – Many clients specify company background. Pointy Head Consulting may only want top people from Egg head Consulting, and P&G may want product managers out of Unilever. You may have a storied background at Marie’s Cookies, but if P&G specified people out of Unilever, they may not be willing to talk with you despite other great qualifications.

5. Accomplishment – This is often confused for another “A” word. Many companies judge a candidate based on how fast they moved up the ladder. While some companies are thrilled to have people who’ve moved up two positions in 7 years, others consider that a sign that you are a substandard performer.

6. Interest –Often people love the idea of a new job, but when the actual opportunity presents itself they realize that they really don’t want to learn a new route to work, or to make new office friends. No one wants to waste time, so you will be asked if you are indeed ready to move.

7. Respect – A recruiter’s job is on the line every time they submit a candidate. They are constantly in contact with the hiring company and have a lot of information about the company’s disposition. Therefore, they look for candidates who are going to listen and comply with most of their suggestions and requests for information. Remember, it’s in the recruiter’s best interest for you to get a shot at the position.