Hiring Candidates Quotes

If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position hire the best writer. it doesn't matter if the person is marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever, their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing clear writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. great writers know how to communicate. they make things easy to understand. they can put themselves in someone else's shoes. they know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. Writing is making a comeback all over our society... Writing is today's currency for good ideas.

Resume's are incapable of holistically communicating a candidates value.

When hiring, we look at a variety of factors, including education, experience, and skills. The biggest factor by far, though, is a candidate’s ability to fit in with our existing culture. Some might say this is why we seem to only hire the same type of people, but who knows?

Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing. I am weary, even more than I am ashamed, of seeing such things. Nowadays people are as good as born in their clothes, and there is practically not a nude human being in existence. An artist, therefore, as you must candidly confess, cannot sculpture nudity with a pure heart, if only because he is compelled to steal guilty glimpses at hired models. The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such circumstances. An old Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the open sunshine, and among pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude statues of antiquity are as modest as violets, and sufficiently draped in their own beauty. But as for Mr. Gibson's colored Venuses (stained, I believe, with tobacco juice), and all other nudities of to-day, I really do not understand what they have to say to this generation, and would be glad to see as many heaps of quicklime in their stead.

The best candidates, whether employed or not, always considered the long-term career opportunity more important than the short-term package.

When I was interviewing people to work for me, and I came upon a candidate who had been an Eagle Scout, I’d almost always try to hire him. I

Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better

We define an A Player this way: a candidate who has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve.

Hire great writers If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn’t matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off. That’s because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate.

He also told me, though he didn’t have to by then, that he liked to hire high-minded people because they would do dirtier work for nothing than low-minded people would for hire. True. If the candidate so much as intimated to me that a principle was involved, it was like unleashing a rattlesnake. A low-minded person would at least have watched his own skin and thought about tomorrow.

If the person’s accomplishments are not comparable to what’s needed to be done, then it’s okay to eliminate the candidate from consideration. It’s not okay to dismiss a person based on emotions, intuition, feelings, or a superficial or biased assessment.

Follow these five decision steps when hiring someone: Understand the job, consider three to five people, study candidates performance records to find their strengths, talk to the candidates’ colleagues about them, and once hired, explain the assignment to the new employee.

The moral of the story: promote only those you would hire. Put your SDRs through the same hiring and evaluation process you would for external candidates. No one benefits—not you, your company, sales leadership, or the SDRs themselves—when a promotion sets reps up to fail.

The insistence is on merit, insinuating that any current majority white leadership in any industry has got there through hard work and no outside help, as if whiteness isn’t its own leg-up, as if it doesn’t imply a familiarity that warms an interviewer to a candidate. When each of the sectors I mentioned earlier have such dire racial representation, you’d have to be fooling yourself if you really think that the homogeneous glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions got there purely through talent alone. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance. Opposing positive discrimination based on apprehensions about getting the best person for the job means inadvertently revealing what you think talent looks like, and the kind of person in which you think talent resides. Because if the current system worked correctly, and if hiring practices were successfully recruiting and promoting the right people for the right jobs in all circumstances, I seriously doubt that so many leadership positions would be occupied by white middle-aged men.

The Effects of Personal Bias and Hiring Urgency There are other types of cognitive biases that affect the hiring process. Another harmful one is personal bias, the basic human instinct to surround yourself with people who are like you. People have a natural desire to hire those with similar characteristics: educational background, professional experience, functional expertise, and similar life experiences. The middle-aged manager who holds a degree from the University of Michigan, worked at McKinsey, lives in the suburbs with a partner and kids, and plays golf will tend to be attracted to candidates with similar attributes.

Defining a job candidate who is a "cultural fit" is about the person being open minded, looks for the positive in others and knowing that life is too short to focus on differences. When interviewing someone, I ask them to describe something they are proud of and why. The best answers are a challenge they overcame using a unique approach.

Still allergic to PowerPoints and formal presentations, he insisted that the people around the table hash out issues from various vantages and the perspectives of different departments. Because he believed that Apple's great advantage was its integration of the whole widget- from design to hardware to software to content-he wanted all departments at the company to work together in parallel. The phrases he used were "deep collaboration" and "concurrent engineering." Instead of a development process in which a product would be passed sequentially from engineering to design to manufacturing to marketing and distribution, these various departments collaborated simultaneously. " Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative," Jobs said. This approach also applied to key hires. He would have candidates meet the top leaders-Cook, Tevanian, Schiller, Rubinstein, Ive- rather than just the managers of the department where they wanted to work. " Then we all get together without the person and talk about whether they'll fit in," Jobs said.

If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head. Companies say such tactics are important in all kinds of settings, including if you’re applying for a job or deciding whom to hire. The candidates who tell stories are the ones every firm wants. “We look for people who describe their experiences as some kind of a narrative,” Andy Billings, a vice president at the video game giant Electronic Arts, told me. “It’s a tip-off that someone has an instinct for connecting the dots and understanding how the world works at a deeper level. That’s who everyone tries to get.” III.

Why aren’t you as wealthy as you should be? It may be because of the way you operate your household. Would a business, especially a very productive one, ever hire a key employee without doing a serious background check and an in-depth interview? No! Yet most people, even those with high incomes, hire financial advisors after obtaining little or no background information about these “employment candidates.” Some

Recognize that listening to your feelings is not the same as acting on your feelings. Keep relevant emotions (those related to the decision you’re facing); toss irrelevant emotions (those unrelated to the decision you’re facing). Do not rely on emotion when deciding whether or not to hire a candidate. Use structured interviews to reduce biased hiring decisions. Before an external negotiation, come to an inner consensus.

There were no actual villains, just inertia. The administration genuinely wanted more diversity for reasons of its image as well as fairness, notwithstanding the cranky alumni letters in The Daily Princetonian. ... Hiring committees had not a clue where to look for or how to attract suitable candidates. And so, though a high-level recruitment plan existed on paper, there was only foot-dragging and defensive excuse making.

Fitza estimates than in addition to these uncontrollable elements, about 70 percent of a company’s performance, for which the CEO normally gets credit and blame, is a matter of pure random chance. When a corporation sets out to find a new chief executive, it often hires headhunters and consulting firms, spending months of work and millions of dollars to pick just the right candidate. Fitza’s research suggests that they might as well have identified a pool of applicants with the general qualifications required for the job, and then just pulled names out of a hat.

every résumé received from a female applicant automatically led to a phone screen. It’s important to say that this solution did not lower the hiring bar, nor did it favor unqualified candidates on the basis of gender. If the candidate did not pass the phone screen, they would not move forward to the next step in the process. This technique made it clear that when a candidate’s name implied the gender as female, an unconscious bias had been affecting the résumé screening. The result was that well-qualified female candidates were apparently being rejected too early in the process.

Mediocre people are a drag on quality and morale, but they tend to do just enough good work to stick around—managers have a tough time justifying letting them go because there’s no actionable offense. The scent of mediocrity on your team can also scare off talented candidates. Mediocrity is an albatross we tether ourselves to when we don’t give the hiring process our full attention. When you hire, look for skill fit, but don’t make it your primary evaluation criteria. Look for passion, curiosity, selflessness, openness, confidence, communication skills, emotional intelligence, and intrinsic motivation, too. These things can’t be taught—most skills can.

You need to make sure that each one of those steps is done more systematically and purposefully. For example, you should think through what questions are asked and how the different answers candidates give differentiate them in the ways that you are seeking to differentiate them. You should also save all of those answers so you can learn about how indicative they might be of subsequent behaviors and performance. I do not mean that the human dimension or art of the hiring process should be eliminated—the personal values and esprit de corps part of a relationship are critically important and can’t be fully measured by data. Sometimes the twinkle in the eye and the facial expressions are telling.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

If people cannot ever develop into one of our top three cooks, servers, managers, or maître d’s, why would we hire them? How will they help us improve and become champions? It’s pretty easy to spot an overwhelmingly strong candidate or even an underwhelmingly weak candidate. It’s the “whelming” candidate you must avoid at all costs, because that’s the one who can and will do your organization the most long-lasting harm. Overwhelmers earn you raves. Underwhelmers either leave on their own or are terminated. Whelmers, sadly, are like a stubborn stain you can’t get out of the carpet. They infuse an organization and its staff with mediocrity; they’re comfortable, and so they never leave; and, frustratingly, they never do anything that rises to the level of getting them promoted or sinks to the level of getting them fired.

What’s the magic number of candidates then? I worked with our firm’s research center in India on a massive analysis to study the relationship between how many people we had presented to our clients in thousands of executive searches all over the world and the “stick rate” of the one hired—that is, how many years he or she had stayed at the company, either in the original position or moving up to a more senior role. My expectation was that a larger pool of people interviewed would increase the stick rate, and that happened up to a point. But after three or four candidates, it rapidly declined, confirming that too many options generate suboptimal decisions. So three to four seems to be the right number, just as it is with the interviewers you involve in your key people decisions. But wait: Weren’t Kepler and Darwin out of this range with their eleven

Our search for a new chairperson had gone pretty much as expected. In September we were given permission to search. In October we were reminded that the position had not yet been funded. In December we were grudgingly permitted to come up with a short list and interview at the convention. In January we were denied permission to bring anyone to campus. In February we were reminded of the hiring freeze and that we had no guarantee that an exception would be made for us, even to hire a new chair. By March all but six of the remaining applicants had either accepted other positions or decided they were better off staying where they were than throwing in with people who were running a search as screwed up as this one. In April we were advised by the dean to narrow our list to three and rank the candidates. There was no need to narrow the list. By then only three remained out of the original two hundred.

Finally, I ask our managers to weigh one other critical factor as they handicap the prospect. Do they believe the candidate has the capacity to become one of the top three performers on our team in his or her job category? If people cannot ever develop into one of our top three cooks, servers, managers, or maître d’s, why would we hire them? How will they help us improve and become champions? It’s pretty easy to spot an overwhelmingly strong candidate or even an underwhelmingly weak candidate. It’s the “whelming” candidate you must avoid at all costs, because that’s the one who can and will do your organization the most long-lasting harm. Overwhelmers earn you raves. Underwhelmers either leave on their own or are terminated. Whelmers, sadly, are like a stubborn stain you can’t get out of the carpet. They infuse an organization and its staff with mediocrity; they’re comfortable, and so they never leave; and, frustratingly, they never do anything that rises to the level of getting them promoted or sinks to the level of getting them fired. And

But then something unexpected happened. Donald Trump, a real estate mogul and television celebrity who did not need the Koch donor network’s money to run, who seemed to have little grasp of the goals of this movement, entered the race. More than that, to get ahead, Trump was able to successfully mock the candidates they had already cowed as “puppets.” And he offered a different economic vision. He loved capitalism, to be sure, but he was not a libertarian by any stretch. Like Bill Clinton before him, he claimed to feel his audience’s pain. He promised to stanch it with curbs on the very agenda the party’s front-runners were promoting: no more free-trade deals that shuttered American factories, no cuts to Social Security or Medicare, and no more penny-pinching while the nation’s infrastructure crumbled. He went so far as to pledge to build a costly wall to stop immigrants from coming to take the jobs U.S. companies offered them because they could hire desperate, rightless workers for less. He said and did a lot more, too, much that was ugly and incendiary. And in November, he shocked the world by winning the Electoral College vote.

Here are four more strategies to help you stack the deck in your favor when seeking a raise or a promotion: ✓ DO YOUR RESEARCH: Understand your market value and, more important, your value to the company. Be prepared to explain, candidly and concretely, what you feel you’re doing that you’re not being compensated for. Have confidence in your own worth. ✓ ASK TO BE PAID FOR THE JOB YOU’RE ACTUALLY DOING: If your responsibilities have increased but you haven’t been recognized since, say, you’ve taken over for the manager who left several months earlier, approach your new boss and say, “I’ve been effectively doing this person’s job since she departed and I’d like to formally assume her position.” Have a conversation. Express that you feel confident you can grow in this role and create value for the organization. ✓ PROVE YOUR WORTH: To earn an increase in salary, you need to be increasing your responsibilities and performing at a higher level than when you were hired. ✓ DON’T NEGOTIATE IF YOUR BOSS SAYS NO: Typically no means no when it comes to this type of discussion. If your boss says no, you have two choices: you either accept the rationale, think about it, and grow based on the feedback, or you leave. This is a good time to be reflective. Ask why you haven’t earned the increase. You may not walk away with a new title or more money, but hopefully you’ll learn something that will help you correct your course moving forward.

Suppose that you need to hire a sales representative for your firm. If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on). Don’t overdo it—six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions. Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1–5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will call “very weak” or “very strong.” These preparations should take you half an hour or so, a small investment that can make a significant difference in the quality of the people you hire. To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one trait at a time, scoring each before you move on to the next one. Do not skip around. To evaluate each candidate, add up the six scores. Because you are in charge of the final decision, you should not do a “close your eyes.” Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better—try to resist your wish to invent broken legs to change the ranking. A vast amount of research offers a promise: you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as “I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw.

Dontchev was born in Bulgaria and emigrated to America as a young kid when his father, a mathematician, took a job at the University of Michigan. He got an undergraduate and graduate degree in aerospace engineering, which led to what he thought was his dream opportunity: an internship at Boeing. But he quickly became disenchanted and decided to visit a friend who was working at SpaceX. “I will never forget walking the floor that day,” he says. “All the young engineers working their asses off and wearing T-shirts and sporting tattoos and being really badass about getting things done. I thought, ‘These are my people.’ It was nothing like the buttoned-up deadly vibe at Boeing.” That summer, he made a presentation to a VP at Boeing about how SpaceX was enabling the younger engineers to innovate. “If Boeing doesn’t change,” he said, “you’re going to lose out on the top talent.” The VP replied that Boeing was not looking for disrupters. “Maybe we want the people who aren’t the best, but who will stick around longer.” Dontchev quit. At a conference in Utah, he went to a party thrown by SpaceX and, after a couple of drinks, worked up the nerve to corner Gwynne Shotwell. He pulled a crumpled résumé out of his pocket and showed her a picture of the satellite hardware he had worked on. “I can make things happen,” he told her. Shotwell was amused. “Anyone who is brave enough to come up to me with a crumpled-up résumé might be a good candidate,” she said. She invited him to SpaceX for interviews. He was scheduled to see Musk, who was still interviewing every engineer hired, at 3 p.m. As usual, Musk got backed up, and Dontchev was told he would have to come back another day. Instead, Dontchev sat outside Musk’s cubicle for five hours. When he finally got in to see Musk at 8 p.m., Dontchev took the opportunity to unload about how his gung-ho approach wasn’t valued at Boeing. When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard. Musk hired Dontchev on the spot.

One rule of thumb is to keep searching for options until you fall in love at least twice. If you’ve only identified one good candidate for a job, for instance, you’ll have the strong urge to talk yourself into hiring her, which is a recipe for the confirmation bias.

I like to see candidates who are busy finding what they are good at and what they enjoy. I call it being busy with a purpose - WHIM

If someone sends out a resumé to three hundred companies, that’s a huge red flag right there. There’s no way that applicant has researched you. There’s no way he knows what’s different about your company. If you hire based on this garbage, you’re missing the point of what hiring is about. You want a specific candidate who cares specifically about your company, your products, your customers, and your job.

When she’s in a courtroom, Wendy Patrick, a deputy district attorney for San Diego, uses some of the roughest words in the English language. She has to, given that she prosecutes sex crimes. Yet just repeating the words is a challenge for a woman who not only holds a law degree but also degrees in theology and is an ordained Baptist minister. “I have to say (a particularly vulgar expletive) in court when I’m quoting other people, usually the defendants,” she admitted. There’s an important reason Patrick has to repeat vile language in court. “My job is to prove a case, to prove that a crime occurred,” she explained. “There’s often an element of coercion, of threat, (and) of fear. Colorful language and context is very relevant to proving the kind of emotional persuasion, the menacing, a flavor of how scary these guys are. The jury has to be made aware of how bad the situation was. Those words are disgusting.” It’s so bad, Patrick said, that on occasion a judge will ask her to tone things down, fearing a jury’s emotions will be improperly swayed. And yet Patrick continues to be surprised when she heads over to San Diego State University for her part-time work of teaching business ethics. “My students have no qualms about dropping the ‘F-bomb’ in class,” she said. “The culture in college campuses is that unless they’re disruptive or violating the rules, that’s (just) the way kids talk.” Experts say people swear for impact, but the widespread use of strong language may in fact lessen that impact, as well as lessen society’s ability to set apart certain ideas and words as sacred. . . . [C]onsider the now-conversational use of the texting abbreviation “OMG,” for “Oh, My God,” and how the full phrase often shows up in settings as benign as home-design shows without any recognition of its meaning by the speakers. . . . Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert in San Antonio, in a blog about workers cleaning up their language, cited a 2012 Career Builder survey in which 57 percent of employers say they wouldn’t hire a candidate who used profanity. . . . She added, “It all comes down to respect: if you wouldn’t say it to your grandmother, you shouldn’t say it to your client, your boss, your girlfriend or your wife.” And what about Hollywood, which is often blamed for coarsening the language? According to Barbara Nicolosi, a Hollywood script consultant and film professor at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian school, lazy script writing is part of the explanation for the blue tide on television and in the movies. . . . By contrast, she said, “Bad writers go for the emotional punch of crass language,” hence the fire-hose spray of obscenities [in] some modern films, almost regardless of whether or not the subject demands it. . . . Nicolosi, who noted that “nobody misses the bad language” when it’s omitted from a script, said any change in the industry has to come from among its ranks: “Writers need to have a conversation among themselves and in the industry where we popularize much more responsible methods in storytelling,” she said. . . . That change can’t come quickly enough for Melissa Henson, director of grass-roots education and advocacy for the Parents Television Council, a pro-decency group. While conceding there is a market for “adult-themed” films and language, Henson said it may be smaller than some in the industry want to admit. “The volume of R-rated stuff that we’re seeing probably far outpaces what the market would support,” she said. By contrast, she added, “the rate of G-rated stuff is hardly sufficient to meet market demands.” . . . Henson believes arguments about an “artistic need” for profanity are disingenuous. “You often hear people try to make the argument that art reflects life,” Henson said. “I don’t hold to that. More often than not, ‘art’ shapes the way we live our lives, and it skews our perceptions of the kind of life we're supposed to live." [DN, Apr. 13, 2014]

And about that drunken Carnival photo: Unless they demonstrate a serious character flaw, we generally don’t hold a candidate’s online photos and commentary against her. We are hiring for passion, remember, and passionate people will often have an exuberant online presence. This demonstrates a love of the digital medium, an important characteristic in today’s world.

Establishing a successful hiring culture that delivers a steady stream of outstanding people starts with understanding the role of recruiters in sourcing candidates. Hint: It isn’t their exclusive realm.

Differential factor. When you strategically develop your value-based résumé, you will define the differential factor. The differential factor represents highly valuable skills, qualifications, and other employment assets that set you apart from other qualified candidates, that make you STAND OUT. Oftentimes, the differential factor is what tips the hiring scale in your favor! For instance, if you have an industry-wide reputation, your reputation might be the differential factor. If you are a black belt in Six Sigma, that may constitute the differential factor. A number of years ago, I coached a chief financial officer who worked for a legendary golf professional. Having worked for a famous golf professional was the differential factor because many hiring managers found it unique and intriguing to interview (and hire) someone who worked for a celebrity. Perhaps you are bilingual; this may represent the differential factor. When you identify the differential factor, you’ll provide your job campaign with a distinct advantage in landing a job quickly in the toughest of job markets.

An effective way to determine the Ultimate Results messages is to answer the following questions: If you were to be hired today, what specific performance standards will you be measured on at your first annual review—a year from now? You get paid for producing results, so what results will you produce that will indicate to a company that you are the best candidate for the job? When you answer these questions, you’ll have your Ultimate Results messages.

Guideline #1: Make your case in 15 to 20 seconds or less. Most hiring authorities claim they spend 15 to 20 seconds, at most, reviewing your résumé to determine if they want to read more of your document and invite you in for an interview. In that 15-to–20-second window of opportunity, you must communicate your value, showcasing and headlining those qualities that ring out, “I’m a highly qualified candidate worthy of a closer look!

When you identify those six to eight messages that will make the most difference in getting an interview and in winning a job offer, you’ll design your résumé (and your job transition campaign) around those messages to give yourself a significant advantage over your competition. The messages must collectively answer the questions, “Why should I hire you?” and “What makes you the best qualified candidate for the job?

Later in the election, Politico moved the goalposts again to stay on top. Speed stopped working so well, so they turned to scandal to upend the race once more. Remember Herman Cain, the preposterous, media-created candidate who came after Pawlenty? After surging ahead as the lead contender for the Republican nomination, and becoming the subject of an exhausting number of traffic-friendly blog posts, Cain’s candidacy was utterly decimated by a sensational but still strongly denied scandal reported by…you guessed it: Politico. I’m sure there were powerful political interests that could not allow Cain to become anything more than a sideshow. So his narrative was changed, and some suspect it was done by a person just like me, hired by another candidate’s campaign—and the story spread, whether it was true or not. If true, from the looks of it whoever delivered the fatal blow did it exactly the way I would have: painfully, untraceably, and impossible to recover from. And so another noncandidate was created, made real, and then taken out. Another one bit the dust so that blogs could fill their cycle.  

Interviews suck. We all seem to understand that fact, but not its implications. Our field is choc-a-bloc with advice from employers to candidates on how best to navigate scary interviews. That's all well and good, but it's the hiring teams that pay the steepest price for poor, biased, and unreliable selection. It can't be the candidate's job to handle irrational processes. Unless you're playing to lose.

Avoid hiring on dubious qualifications. When in doubt, move on to the next candidate.

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The factors that usually decide presidential elections—the economy, likability of the candidates, and so on—added up to a wash, and the outcome came down to a few key swing states. Mitt Romney’s campaign followed a conventional polling approach, grouping voters into broad categories and targeting each one or not. Neil Newhouse, Romney’s pollster, said that “if we can win independents in Ohio, we can win this race.” Romney won them by 7 percent but still lost the state and the election. In contrast, President Obama hired Rayid Ghani, a machine-learning expert, as chief scientist of his campaign, and Ghani proceeded to put together the greatest analytics operation in the history of politics. They consolidated all voter information into a single database; combined it with what they could get from social networking, marketing, and other sources; and set about predicting four things for each individual voter: how likely he or she was to support Obama, show up at the polls, respond to the campaign’s reminders to do so, and change his or her mind about the election based on a conversation about a specific issue. Based on these voter models, every night the campaign ran 66,000 simulations of the election and used the results to direct its army of volunteers: whom to call, which doors to knock on, what to say. In politics, as in business and war, there is nothing worse than seeing your opponent make moves that you don’t understand and don’t know what to do about until it’s too late. That’s what happened to the Romney campaign. They could see the other side buying ads in particular cable stations in particular towns but couldn’t tell why; their crystal ball was too fuzzy. In the end, Obama won every battleground state save North Carolina and by larger margins than even the most accurate pollsters had predicted. The most accurate pollsters, in turn, were the ones (like Nate Silver) who used the most sophisticated prediction techniques; they were less accurate than the Obama campaign because they had fewer resources. But they were a lot more accurate than the traditional pundits, whose predictions were based on their expertise. You might think the 2012 election was a fluke: most elections are not close enough for machine learning to be the deciding factor. But machine learning will cause more elections to be close in the future. In politics, as in everything, learning is an arms race. In the days of Karl Rove, a former direct marketer and data miner, the Republicans were ahead. By 2012, they’d fallen behind, but now they’re catching up again.

They may be in charge of handling referring candidates to hiring man- agers at the end of interviews, or the interviewer may ask for their help if two equally qualified personnel present themselves. If

WOLVES IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING—I’VE MET THEM, AND SO HAVE YOU Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. Matthew 7:15 Alaska has its wolves. You can’t miss them. They’re ferocious and deadly. But at least they’re obvious. Washington, D.C., has wolves, too, though they dress in sheep’s clothing—at least at election time. Still, if you watch long enough, and closely enough, you’ll catch them stripping off their disguising, flea-ridden wool and exposing their wolfish fangs. The media obviously push certain politicians to the forefront, and more often than not it’s the most liberal of the bunch. In other words, they’re pushing false prophets who want to sell you a bill of goods while they “fundamentally transform” our country. So do your own homework on candidates and issues, and investigate what’s beneath the sheep’s clothing. The voting record—and business record—of a politician will tell you a lot of what you need to know. We have a responsibility to elect leaders who will bear good fruit. That means we need to be wise in the voting booth. It means that if you vote for a liberal Democrat, don’t be surprised if he appoints an activist judge who overturns the will of the people, or if he hires left-leaning bureaucrats who regulate you out of basic constitutional rights. (And by the way, keep an eye on Republicans too: most of them need to get serious about out-of-control spending.) When you vote for politicians, think about the fullness of what they can do, how they will make decisions, how they will vote or lead. It’s a heavy responsibility—but it’s ours. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Before any election, don’t listen to the mainstream media insisting you vote for their chosen one. Look out for false prophets, for wolves in sheep’s clothing. Inform yourself and make your decision—and remember that you are morally accountable for your vote.

Are unclear about what is needed in a job • Have a weak flow of candidates • Do not trust their ability to pick out the right candidate from a group of similar-looking candidates • Lose candidates they really want to join

At Google, we front-load our people investment. This means the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing, and cultivating new hires. We spend more than twice as much on recruiting, as a percentage of our people budget, as an average company. If we are better able to select people up front, that means we have less work to do with them once they are hired. The worst case with a 90th percentile candidate is that they have an average year. They are unlikely to become the worst performer in the company. An average candidate, however, will not only consume massive training resources, but is also just as likely to end up performing well below average as above average.

Culture is a key part of the hiring process at Airbnb too. Each candidate also goes through a values interview, conducted by an Airbnb employee who isn’t that candidate’s hiring manager. This ensures that values are considered independently of how much the organization needs that candidate’s particular job skills.

The ideal, of course, is to hire an executive with past experience at a blitzscaling start-up that has already dealt with the challenges your company currently faces. This is why investors have more confidence in serial entrepreneurs. One of the major advantages that companies in Silicon Valley enjoy is generations of rapidly scaling companies that have produced a rich supply of executives with blitzscaling experience. Yet even if you can’t land an ideal candidate, second best is to hire a manager who has previously worked with successful executives in a very rapidly growing company, or an executive who earned her executive experience at a larger or more traditional business but who also worked at a blitzscaling start-up at another time in her career.

We decided to boil our list down to just a few key criteria around which we could easily evaluate candidates. We settled on six: •​An intense desire to win: We didn’t want a new CEO who was adept at explaining why something didn’t happen, but rather someone who could figure out how to win even if unanticipated problems cropped up. •​Intelligence: We wanted someone smart and analytical who could avoid problems before they arose. •​The ability to think independently: Fad surfers need not apply. •​Courage: My successor had to be capable of making bold decisions, while also checking afterward to verify that these decisions were correct. •​Curiosity: We needed a CEO who could stay fresh over time by exposing him or herself to novel ideas—someone who was self-aware and dedicated to learning. •​An ability to motivate and build a strong culture: Our next CEO had to be able to mobilize the company behind the strategy, hiring great people and motivating them.

the hiring manager needs to take responsibility for the interview effectiveness of the interview team, and the interview experience for the candidate.

identify your employee adjectives, (2) recruit through proper advertising, (3) identify winning personalities, and (4) select your winners. Step One: Identify Your Employee Adjectives When you think of your favorite employees in the past, what comes to mind? A procedural element such as an organized workstation, neat paperwork, or promptness? No. What makes an employee memorable is her attitude and smile, the way she takes the time to make sure a customer is happy, the extra mile she goes to ensure orders are fulfilled and problems are solved. Her intrinsic qualities—her energy, sense of humor, eagerness, and contributions to the team—are the qualities you remember. Rather than relying on job descriptions that simply quantify various positions’ duties and correlating them with matching experience as a tool for identifying and hiring great employees, I use a more holistic approach. The first step in the process is selecting eight adjectives that best define the personality ideal for each job or role in your business. This is a critical step: it gives you new visions and goals for your own management objectives, new ways to measure employee success, and new ways to assess the performance of your own business. Create a “Job Candidate Profile” for every job position in your business. Each Job Candidate Profile should contain eight single- and multiple-word phrases of defining adjectives that clearly describe the perfect employee for each job position. Consider employee-to-customer personality traits, colleague-to-colleague traits, and employee-to-manager traits when making up the list. For example, an accounting manager might be described with adjectives such as “accurate,” “patient,” “detailed,” and “consistent.” A cocktail server for a nightclub or casual restaurant would likely be described with adjectives like “energetic,” “fun,” “music-loving,” “sports-loving,” “good-humored,” “sociable conversationalist,” “adventurous,” and so on. Obviously, the adjectives for front-of-house staff and back-of-house staff (normally unseen by guests) will be quite different. Below is one generic example of a Job Candidate Profile. Your lists should be tailored for your particular bar concept, audience, location, and style of business (high-end, casual, neighborhood, tourist, and so on). BARTENDER Energetic Extroverted/Conversational Very Likable (first impression) Hospitable, demonstrates a Great Service Attitude Sports Loving Cooperative, Team Player Quality Orientated Attentive, Good Listening Skills SAMPLE ADJECTIVES Amazing Ambitious Appealing Ardent Astounding Avid Awesome Buoyant Committed Courageous Creative Dazzling Dedicated Delightful Distinctive Diverse Dynamic Eager Energetic Engaging Entertaining Enthusiastic Entrepreneurial Exceptional Exciting Fervent Flexible Friendly Genuine High-Energy Imaginative Impressive Independent Ingenious Keen Lively Magnificent Motivating Outstanding Passionate Positive Proactive Remarkable Resourceful Responsive Spirited Supportive Upbeat Vibrant Warm Zealous Step Two: Recruit through Proper Advertising The next step is to develop print or online advertising copy that will attract the personalities you’ve just defined.

With a StoryBrand-inspired narrative, ordinary jobs become extraordinary adventures. With a unifying BrandScript, the above story would have gone more like this: Before even applying for a job, the prospective employee has already heard the buzz on the street about this cool company. It’s somehow more alive. The people who work there love it and so do their customers. They exude a sense of competence within their industry as well as across the community in general. Their leaders are respected. Even their former employees talk about it with a hint of sentimental longing. On the list of ideal places to work, there are few that compare. During the first interview, the candidate starts to understand where the buzz has been coming from. The hiring manager describes the company the way you might describe Lewis and Clarke preparing to tame the western frontier. There are interesting characters whose lives have led them to this place. Business goals sound like plot twists. There are mountains to climb and rivers to cross. There are storms to weather, bears to hunt, and treasure to find. The hiring manager is visibly excited as she walks effortlessly through the seven categories of the company’s narrative. But not just anyone gets selected for this expedition. The employees of this company aren’t trying to be snobs; they’re just staying true to the story they’re following and they don’t want to compromise the plot. If you happen to be selected, it’s because destiny basically demands it. Instantly the candidate’s concept of work shifts up a level. It’s no longer just about what he can get out of it. It’s also about who he will become if he’s allowed to enter the story. He senses that working for this company will transform him. By the second and third interviews, the candidate has met most of the team and even been interviewed by them. Everyone he meets tells the exact same story he heard on the street and in the first interview. The story is growing on him. He realizes he needs to be part of a story like this to be fully satisfied in life. We all do. Finally, his first day on the job arrives, and the onboarding experience is more like being adopted than getting hired. He spends quality time with a facilitator who takes a small, new team through a curriculum explaining the story of their customer and how the company positions themselves as the guide in their customers’ story. Amazingly, the onboarding is more about the company’s customers than it is about the company itself. This organization loves their customers and is obsessed with seeing them win the day. Finally, the new employee discovers the secret. These people are here to serve a customer they love.

Best Tips for Govt Interview Jobs In Pakistan for 2020 Doing Practice Interviews to Succeed in Government Jobs in Pakistan is first on our list: You really have a lot of opportunities to do these things. When I was a college student, in my four years, every year when I entered the career fair town, there were real recruiters coming to CareerCentrendrand, giving their time for interview jobs with any student who signed up. One. Now, these interviews are not real interviews, but are they real conversations with people who hire managers or HR people at companies that are going to be at a career fair? So in addition to good practice for real interviews in the future, they are a good networking experience with people who make decisions in the future. But the main advantage of these types of interviews is that they are great learning for the real thing, because the interview is inherently a nerve-wracking experience. Tip number two to everyone you interact with any institution or company cesukovaliippudu friendly and engaged, or they talk to people who do not seem dirty secretary instityutlaloki trip and they are saying to the people, but a lot of students go to an institution or firm, and p If a little more time to wait before the interview for jobs kistanlo. They sit in the waiting room and stare at their phones. As I can tell you from experience, people who are not hiring managers notice the behavior of potential candidates, and then they talk to those hiring managers. In most companies, hiring decisions don't just come to the public you interview. They are going to ask anyone who has spoken to a potential candidate if they have any objections. So if you come into any institute or company, take some time to talk to the person at the front desk, a few minutes before the interview. Or if they are busy, at least be polite, greet them, ask them how their day is going, and then sit down and do your waiting. Do not. Continues. In addition, come to the interview with your own questions and tell the interviewer that you are engaged, that you are 'interested in this position and you have made some preparations for an interview for government jobs in Pakistan. You may think that you are all too familiar with any questions, and that's a good thing, in fact it does what it does if the interviewer is apathetic towards you and is doing it for the money. One question you definitely need to keep in your back pocket is whether I am going to make progress or additional opportunities in this company. The great thing about this type of question is that it tells your interviewer that you are comfortable and comfortable and ready to learn new things, and this is a great quality to have if you are a business owner and someone you are working with. My third tip is about asking questions during the interview. Tip number is to research the company before you walk into that interview room: once again, it shows preparation and dedication that most other candidates don't

Your role as an interviewer has a direct impact on each person you meet. Some candidates will be at a crossroad in their lives. Some candidates may want to make a career move. Others not so much. Some, through displacement or termination, have been placed in a position in which they are forced to make a change. We have all been there, whether through our own choice or the choice of someone else. We are forced into making a change, and change can be scary.

Candidates will remember how they were treated during the interview process, and this will impact your reputation, your company’s reputation, and your ability to hire top talent in the future.

Surface interviewing means you don’t fully dive in with questioning this individual. You meet your candidate; they seem nice, and you never get around to fully understanding what makes them tick, their career goals, background, and accomplishments.

Seibel: When you're hiring programmers, how do you recognize the good ones? Crockford: The approach I've taken now is to do a code reading. I invite the candidate to bring in a piece of code he's really proud of and walk us through it.

I consider private equity and venture capital as opposites. In private equity, you start with the numbers, and then you try to fit everything into the numbers. In venture capital, you start with people, and then you try to figure out what numbers you can make.” Mark Kachur, former CEO of CUNO, a company that was acquired for over a billion dollars.

This principle of only hiring people who are better than the ones we currently have means we don’t make desperation hires to fill an open position. And the raise-the-average rule makes hiring decisions surprisingly easy. It’s easy to visualize in your mind the average person in your sales force or on your brewery floor or even in senior management and it’s easy for your intuition to evaluate whether a candidate is better than the average person. Your gut will tell you. If you’re used to traditional hiring, you might feel uncomfortable turning to intuition. Aren’t we taking too big a risk by relying on our gut feelings about somebody rather than rationally assessing facts such as past experience or education? I would counter that we’re fooling ourselves by not relying primarily on intuition. As recent neuroscience has shown, our brains don’t work rationally. If you hook a functional MRI machine to a chess grandmaster, you find that the best of them are not rationally calculating their next moves; they’re imagining what will happen, unconsciously bringing to bear the hundreds of thousands of moves they’ve already seen. They’re arriving at a feeling that guides their actions. They are using the nonrational part of their brain. The quantitatively logical part of your brain is pretty paltry. Just try counting by prime numbers while you’re multiplying other numbers by seventeen. Impossible. But reading emotions by looking at someone’s facial expressions while you’re navigating a crowded sidewalk is easy for your brain.

Before moving on, I want to pause to point out that a lot of what search candidates call “illegal” questions may not technically be illegal. But they are absolutely inappropriate, and may well be ambiguous enough that they could lead to lawsuits alleging discrimination, and often do in hiring contexts that are more litigious than the academy. Not every grossly inappropriate and discomfiting question necessarily falls into the illegality. I am no lawyer and no expert, so beyond this I direct you to investigate further with human resources at your institution. In the meantime, master the art of redirection, as with toddlers.

At best, hiring is a 50/50 crap shoot. Hiring great folks is critical to building the team, and it’s not easy. Many folks put on a great interview, but the excellence ends there. Others get solid references and you wonder if you hired the same person. And, in other cases, you get a start from somebody you never expected. My best interview question is, “What would your worst reference say about you?” It’s hard to give the answer to that question, “I work too hard,” with a straight face. I have also found that having key candidates take an assessment test gives you more data. Lastly, back-channel references are the best. It’s hard for candidates to game them.

While hiring, look for candidates who have been laid off, or who took extended paternity or maternity leave to be with their kids in their growing years. Not only will it give you an excellent hiring experience, in terms of lower joining attrition rate and shorter recruitment cycle, but it will also ensure higher retention rate. People who get laid-off are not bad people or non-performers, it is just that they didn't fit into the culture of one organization or that particular organization couldn't afford them (cost-cutting). Such people deserve to be looked differently and given another chance. People who take an extended break to take care of their infants are career oriented people with a temporary shift in their priorities, do not make it look permanent.

Human resource directors and hiring managers tell me they usually know within the first thirty seconds of a job interview whether or not the person is even a viable candidate.

How a person treats wait staff speaks volumes about their character and values. If they misbehave in this scenario, you can likely predict how they will react when cut off in traffic, when their luggage is lost, or when life doesn’t go their way. It is also an indicator to CEOs and hiring managers as to whether a person is a viable candidate for being a considerate team player.

Another central element is the list of candidate competencies that align with your culture and strategy. As experienced leaders discover, it’s more important to hire for this kind of fit than for specific skills, so long as a person has the capacity to learn and grow (though it’s best if you can find someone who’s a match in both cultural values and skill set).

In the budget the term we use for it is bracketing. We hire a contractor, like Bob Creamer, to do this work of organizing the opposition force, and also to organize rallies for our candidates. The Republicans do it, too. The footage of Creamer and Scott Foval boasting about picking fights with crazy people in the line to a campaign rally looked terrible. Foval was taped saying, “It doesn’t matter what the fricking legal and ethics people say. We need to win this mother fucker… In the lines at Trump rallies, we’re starting anarchy.

If that sounds cultish, I’m unapologetic. When organizations talk about creating an innovative business culture, a lot of people focus on the external symbols. The ping-pong and foosball tables in the office, the team-building Thursday beers after work, the company ski weekends, and the anything-goes dress code. At TMHQ we have all those things. But they are marginal to what we are really about. A culture is built up over months and years of good practice, questioning, and improvement. Of doing things the right way and having anyone who comes into the group or participates in an event recognize what that means. Culture is all the things that happen in an organization when the boss isn’t looking. Tony Hsieh describes, in his book Delivering Happiness, how he built his online shoe business Zappos by concentrating on service and integrity above all else. “Your personal core values define who you are,” he argued, “and a company’s core values ultimately define the company’s character and brand. For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.” I think that’s true, and doubly so when you are “delivering happiness” as an experience that asks people to take on and display some of the virtues of that culture themselves. In this sense, we believed, in our initial phase of recruiting, that a candidate’s previous career path and qualifications were less important than his or her willingness to embrace our credo. Though we had no experience in event management, the plan was never to go out and hire people from the event industry. We had obstacles where participants jump through flames and we feared the first thing an outside event person might instinctively do was pull out a fire extinguisher.

In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? My biggest shift came after listening to a successful CEO talk about his philosophy for hiring people. When his company grew and he ran out of time to interview people himself, he had his employees rate new candidates on a 1–10 scale. The only stipulation was they couldn’t choose 7. It immediately dawned on me how many invitations I was receiving that I would rate as a 7—speeches, weddings, coffees, even dates. If I thought something was a 7, there was a good chance I felt obligated to do it. But if I have to decide between a 6 or an 8, it’s a lot easier to quickly determine whether or not I should even consider it.

You hired for the generic position. There is no such thing as a great CEO, a great head of marketing, or a great head of sales. There is only a great head of sales for your company for the next twelve to twenty-four months. That position is not the same as the same position at Microsoft or Facebook. Don’t look for the candidate out of central casting. This is not a movie.

One interview technique that I’d used to sort the good from the bad was to ask a series of questions about hiring, training, and managing sales reps. Typically, it would go like this: Ben: “What do you look for in a sales rep?” Candidate: “They need to be smart, aggressive, and competitive. They need to know how to do complex deals and navigate organizations.” Ben: “How do you test for those things in an interview?” Candidate: “Umm, well, I hire everybody out of my network.” Ben: “Okay, once you get them on board, what do you expect from them?” Candidate: “I expect them to understand and follow the sales process, I expect them to master the product, I expect them to be accurate in their forecasting. . . .” Ben: “Tell me about the training program that you designed to achieve this.” Candidate: “Umm.” They would then proceed to make something up as they went along.

I had no background, or I had a very exiguous background in finance. The guy who hired me always talked about hiring good intellectual athletes, people who were sort of mentally agile in an all-around way, and that the specifics of finance you could learn, which I think is true. But at the time, I mean, no hedge fund was really flooded with applicants, and that allowed him to let his mind range a little bit and consider different kinds of candidates. Today we have a recruiting group, and what do they do? They throw résumés at you, and it’s, like, one business school guy, one finance major after another, kids who, from the time they were twelve years old, were watching Jim Cramer and dreaming of working in a hedge fund. And I think in reality that probably they’re less likely to make good investors than people with sort of more interesting backgrounds. n+1: Why? HFM: Because I think that in the end the way that you make a ton of money is calling paradigm shifts, and people who are real finance types, maybe they can work really well within the paradigm of a particular kind of market or a particular set of rules of the game—and you can make money doing that—but the people who make huge money, the George Soroses and Julian Robertsons of the world, they’re the people who can step back and see when the paradigm is going to shift, and I think that comes from having a broader experience, a little bit of a different approach to how you think about things.

My call to action goes well beyond asking you to pressure your recruiting team to hire a couple of token employees. That's easy and you've been doing that for years. My call to action is that you dig deeper and place focus on making the work environment sustainable for the minorities you introduce to your team. I'm challenging you to refrain from the habitual practice of listening only to the jaded opinions of people that you are more familiar with. Consider that, although you may be under the impression that your employees have strong ethics, morals and values, there is a possibility that they mat not be telling you the entire truth when speaking about the performance or demeanor of minorities. Furthermore, I challenge you to accept that racism, ageism, ableism, classism, sizeism, homophobia, etc., are real and shaping the semblance of your organization. Accepting that fact does not mean that people you work with and trust are bad people. It simply means that many of them are naïve, fearful, and more comfortable with pointing fingers at the innocent than they are with facing and addressing their own unconscious and damaging biases.

company late at night when sitting on the couch deciding to search for their next career move. It’s the perception in a candidate's mind about what you have to offer as a prospective employer and one of the most critical factors in how an individual decides to approach their job search. What do most people get wrong about employer branding?

Test-drive employees Interviews are only worth so much. Some people sound like pros but don’t work like pros. You need to evaluate the work they can do now, not the work they say they did in the past. The best way to do that is to actually see them work. Hire them for a miniproject, even if it’s for just twenty or forty hours. You’ll see how they make decisions. You’ll see if you get along. You’ll see what kind of questions they ask. You’ll get to judge them by their actions instead of just their words. You can even make up a fake project. In a factory in South Carolina, BMW built a simulated assembly line where job candidates get ninety minutes to perform a variety of work-related tasks.* Cessna, the airplane manufacturer, has a role-playing exercise for prospective managers that simulates the day of an executive. Candidates work through memos, deal with (phony) irate customers, and handle other problems. Cessna has hired more than a hundred people using this simulation.† These companies have realized that when you get into a real work environment, the truth comes out. It’s one thing to look at a portfolio, read a resumé, or conduct an interview. It’s another to actually work with someone.

Hiring Managers say, “You Are A Top Candidate” They tell you this because they want you to stop looking and focus on this role, so that you’re still available when they actually make a decision. What's worse, they may not know whether the top candidate will accept their offer or not. Hence, they need someone if the top candidate declines their offer. In fact, they may not know whether the top three candidates will accept the offer. For that reason, they may tell anywhere from three to ten applicants that they are top candidates.

Hiring Managers say, “We’ll Decide By The End Of The Month” They tell you this because they’re hoping it will make their position top in your mind. As a result, you’ll be less likely to look elsewhere. In other words, they want you to still be available when they get around to deciding. Even though some hiring managers may want to decide by the end of the month, there are many factors beyond the hiring manager’s control. I’ve seen this at my current work. We interviewed a great and well-liked candidate. However, the hiring manager was exceedingly busy responding to her boss’s requests. As a result, the candidate wisely landed another role with another company. I attended church with someone who, before he was hired, had to tell his current employer, "It’s been seven months. If you don’t make a decision now, I’m moving on.

The Most Widely Known Path If you're like most people, you believe landing an interview is limited to these three steps: 1.) Applying online, 2.) HR reviewing your application, and 3.) If your application is selected, the hiring manager reviewing it. You believe this because almost everything you’ve read comes from current or former HR folks. This process has significant flaws. Because the Internet made applying for positions easy, HR was drowning in applications. As a result, the HR Elimination system was born. That’s not its official name, but the name fits. The official name is Applicant Tracking System or ATS. ATS systems reject, on average, 75% of all applicants. Sometimes the rejection rate can be as high as 90%. J. P. Medved, content director at Capterra, a firm that helps companies find the right software for their business, said, Reducing the number of candidates might seem good if we're weeding out irrelevant resumes...In reality, many of these rejected candidates were knocked out of the running for bad reasons. An automated system, like an ATS, will sometimes reject people for very minor reasons, like incorrect resume formatting. Bersin & Associates, an Oakland-based firm specializing in talent management, tested an ATS system. They created the perfect resume for an ideal candidate for a clinical scientist position. Matching the resume to the job description from a leading manufacturer, they submitted the resume to an applicant tracking system. The ATS lost one of the candidate's work experiences. It also failed to read several educational degrees. As a result, the perfect resume for a clinical scientist position earned a score of 43, because the applicant tracking system misread it. Similarly, a Vice-President of Human Resources decided to test his company's ATS system. He applied for a job at his own company and received an automated rejection letter from the ATS.

Henry Ford inviting job candidates to dinner and watching them eat. He never hired the man who salted his food before tasting it.

are your career goals? This first question is powerful because it allows you to hear about a candidate’s goals and passions before you taint the discussion with your own comments. You give the candidate the first word, rather than telling the person about the company so he or she can parrot back what you just said. Ideally, a candidate will share career goals that match your company’s needs. If he or she lacks goals or sounds like an echo of your own Web site, screen the person out. You are done with the call. Talented people know what they want to do and are not afraid to tell you about it.

This success isn’t unique to her: there’s evidence that people are more interested in hiring candidates who acknowledge legitimate weaknesses as opposed to bragging or humble-bragging.

Race norming is the practice of converting individual test scores to percentile or standard scores within one’s racial group. In the process of race norming, an individual’s percentile score is not calculated in reference to all persons who took the test; instead, an individual’s percentile score is determined only in reference to others in the same racial group. After norming scores by percentile in separate racial groups, the lists are combined to make selection decisions. By norming within racial groups, the same raw score for Whites and Blacks can be converted to different percentile scores based on the distribution of scores for each racial group. For example, suppose that a White candidate and a Black candidate each earn a raw score of 74 points on a test. If the White candidate’s test score is converted to a percentile only in reference to other White candidates and the Black candidate’s test score is converted to a percentile only in reference to other Black candidates, then the percentile scores earned by the two candidates may not be equal even though they attained the same raw test score. Perhaps the 74-point raw score for the White candidate may be at the 60th percentile of the White distribution of scores, whereas the 74-point score for the Black candidate may be at the 65th percentile of the Black distribution of scores. When the White and Black percentile scores are combined into a common list and selection decisions are made, the candidates who scored the same 74 raw points on the test might be treated very differently. For example, if the organization decides to hire only persons who scored at the 65th percentile and above, then the Black candidate would be selected and the White candidate would not. In another circumstance, the organization could decide to hire persons with the highest percentile first, which would mean that the Black candidate would be selected prior to the White candidate.

In January 2017, Bloomberg reported that although Facebook had started giving recruiters an incentive to bring in more women, black, and Latino engineering candidates back in 2015, the program was netting few new hires. According to former Facebook recruiters, this was because the people responsible for final hiring approvals—twenty to thirty senior leaders who were almost entirely white and Asian men—still assessed candidates by using the same metrics as always: whether they had gone to the right school, already worked at a top tech company, or had friends at Facebook who gave them a positive referral.15 What this means is that, even after making it through round after round of interviews designed to prove their skills and merits, many diverse hires would be blocked at the final stage—all because they didn’t match the profile of the people already working at Facebook.

Networking Beats The HR Elimination System Every Time In a LinkedIn post, Lynda Spiegel shared that she submitted her resume to two different companies, both looking for a senior level human resources executive with global experience. Lynda's experience matched most of the requirements. However, within hours of hitting "send," she received emails from both companies telling her there were other candidates more qualified for the position. Fortunately, Lynda had used her connections to send her resume to the hiring managers at both firms. Within one day of the ATS rejection, she received calls from these hiring managers asking her to interview based on the strength of her resume.

Staffing Companies Staffing firms are hired by companies to vet candidates. Many of the top employers in my area use staffing firms to vet candidates for open positions. The last time I was in the job market, I got a call from a local staffing firm fifteen days before I started my new job. When I met with the firm, though, I found there was one big problem. Since I had already applied to the leading companies in my area, the staffing firm could not earn a commission by recommending me to their clients. In fact, twelve months had to pass since my last application for the Staffing firm to earn a commission by recommending me. I’m sharing this strategy early in the book, because pursuing this option could cut months off your job search.

Contacting the Hiring Manager I have also contacted hiring managers directly. Sometimes it’s as simple as calling the company and saying I want to speak to Joseph Hiring Manager. The voice recognition or ‘type the name’ systems that are so common today are best, because they won’t ask why you’re calling. Once, when I called a hiring manager directly, I got three interviews. Because I took the effort to call, I became a known quantity. I differentiated myself from the other candidates who didn’t call.

The Wisdom of Pursuing Other Paths When you only apply online, you’re betting your future on the Applicant Tracking System. I know I’m repeating myself, however it’s critical that you understand this. ATS systems reject, on average, 75% of all applicants. The percentage can be as high as 90%. When you pursue career opportunities through networking, staffing companies, recruiters, or calling the hiring manager, your future is no longer in the hands of the HR Elimination System. In other words, you significantly increase your chances of landing a job. Orville Pierson, a former Vice President at Lee Hecht Harrison, the largest outplacement firm in the U.S. and author of three job search books, provides these success rates: Networking or “Just Plain Talking To Other People” as Pierson likes to call it, is responsible for 75% of all hires. Pierson says networking enables you to become a known candidate, either as a referral or recommendation from an internal employee. Nothing makes a candidate more valuable than being known.

After extensive reading, I feel like the MOST IMPORTANT ADVICE is always left out…the most important being… … Understand How the Hiring Manager Thinks Secret #1 3 Questions That Determine If You Are A Candidate Can You Do The Job? Will You Like The Job Enough To Stay There? Can We Stand To Work With You? Secret #2 4 Ways To Differentiate Yourself From All Other Candidates: Have You Made Money For Your Employers? Have You Saved Money For Your Employers? Have You Increased the Productivity of Your Employers? Have You Made A Difference at Your Employers? Everything I did before, during and after the interview was geared toward answering those questions in as much detail as possible.

Your Beliefs When it comes to job seeking, I like what Saint Augustine said: Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you. Because I follow this strategy, I believe I will be hired. I also believe I'll be hired, since my last employer gave me more chances to learn how to get hired than most people have in their lifetime. Because of those experiences: I realize I must stand out from all of the other candidates. I stand out by clearly communicating my track record of solving complex problems. The best way to communicate how you can solve problems is to include your stories of overcoming obstacles and resolving work issues in: • Your Cover Letter • Your Resume • Your Achievement Stories • Your LinkedIn Recommendations • Your Portfolio.

Important Warning Before you raise a red flag and say, “I can’t do this,” remember: being shy about sharing your strengths can result in not getting offers. If you get offers, they will be at lower salaries. For example, I have a friend, who I’ll call Jonathan. I coached him on the value of achievement stories. I also recommended him to a staffing firm. He told me later that they never called him back. They never called him back, because he never spoke of his achievements. Staffing firms are paid to provide great candidates to prospective employers. If someone can’t promote themselves — if someone cannot explain why they are a great candidate — they’ll never get a call back, whether it’s from a staffing firm, a hiring manager, or anyone else. While I understand that my friend probably views Achievement Stories as bragging, I overcame this hurdle. When I talk about accomplishments, I say: “I’m blessed with the ability to…” “I’ve been fortunate enough to…” “Leadership appreciates how…” “Co-workers appreciate how…” This is an ideal way to communicate your achievements, because hiring managers prefer humble candidates. But they do want to hear about your achievements.

How to Quantify Achievement Stories When hiring managers, recruiters, and staffing firms see a resume or LinkedIn profile or attend an interview with verbiage but no numbers, they don’t know what those words mean. In fact, they know next to nothing until you add the numbers that explain the impact of your work. Here’s how you can resolve this issue. Work With Finance Sometimes the impact of our work is not always clear. At times like this, reaching out to one of your friends in the Finance Department can be very helpful. Finance has access to numbers that are not always readily available to other departments. If you’re no longer with the company, explain to the Finance associate that the numbers he provides could make the difference in determining whether you land another position. Using a Range Per Lily Zhang of the Muse, one reason job seekers avoid quantifying is not knowing the exact number. Lily suggests using a range. Using my work experience, here’s what that means: Before: Chaired weekly product manager meeting. After: Chaired weekly meeting with 7 to 12 product managers so plans could be discussed and coordinated. Confusion and rework were eliminated. Frequency Lily shared that one of the easiest ways to add numbers is to identify the frequency with which you perform a given task. This can help the hiring manager understand how much you can handle. For example: Before: Responded to pricing requests from the Sales Force. After: Responded to 15 to 20 pricing requests from the Sales Force on a daily basis. Scale Everyone on the hiring side of the business loves when candidates provide numbers, because numbers explain the impact of what you’ve done. The most meaningful numbers are those associated with making money, saving money, and driving productivity. Here are a couple examples from my work experience: Before: Reduced time to perform Operations Manager’s role; after analysis showed tasks could be batched and performed at the end of the month. After: Reduced time to perform Operations Manager role by 66%; after analysis showed tasks could be batched and performed at the end of the month. Asked Director if I could take on the responsibilities of employees who were laid off. Before: Analysis revealed misconfigured offers; worked with other departments to correct errors. Implemented process to prevent future errors. After: Analysis revealed misconfigured offers; worked with other departments to correct errors. Recognized $7.2M. Implemented process to prevent future errors.

How To Write Achievement Stories Because you’re asking people to take a chance on you, you need to show them why they should take a chance. We live in a world best summarized by the words of Grant Cardone: Sell Or Be Sold! Practically, everything we hear and read on TV, radio, and the internet is an attempt to sell us something. When you find yourself in front of the hiring manager, it’s essential that you sell yourself. Selling yourself means helping the hiring manager understand why she should hire you. Hiring managers want to know how you’re different from all of the other candidates. If you can’t answer that question, you won’t get a second interview. After my job was eliminated in ’95 and ’02, I knew I had to quantify the impact of my work, so I would be ready for the next time. As a result, I took detailed notes on everything I did that 1) earned money, 2) saved money, and 3) increased productivity. I also took detailed notes on everything that set me apart from other candidates. Because everyone responds well to stories, and detailed stories add to your credibility, I created Achievement Stories. Achievement stories are also known as STAR stories. STAR is short for Situation – Task – Action – Result. Another name for Achievement stories is SOAR stories. (See explanation below.) Situation First, provide the context of what was happening. This is the before picture, namely what was going on at the time, before you took action. Obstacles These are the issues and problems which you had to overcome to be successful. Action This is where you explain what you did to overcome the issues and problems. Results This is where you share the outcome of your action – both quantitatively and qualitatively.

What If I Don’t Want To Brag? I’ve mentioned this before and I’ll mention it again because it is critical… Before you raise a red flag and say, “I can’t do this,” remember: being shy about sharing your strengths can result in not getting offers. If you do get offers, chances are they will be at lower salaries. I have a friend who I’ll call Jonathan. I coached him on the importance and value of achievement stories. I also recommended him to a staffing firm. He told me later that after his interview, the staffing firm never called him back. They never called him back, because he never spoke of his achievements. Staffing firms are paid for providing great candidates to prospective employers. If someone can’t promote themselves — if someone cannot explain why they are a great candidate — they’ll never get a call back, whether it’s from a staffing firm, a hiring manager or anyone. While I understand that my friend probably views Achievement Stories as bragging, I overcame this hurdle by describing my accomplishments this way: “I’m blessed with the ability to…” “I’ve been fortunate enough to…” “Leadership appreciates how…” “Co-workers appreciate how…” This is an ideal way to communicate your achievements because hiring managers prefer humble candidates.

you have a doubt about a person's humility, hunger, or smarts, don't ignore it. Keep probing. More often than not, there is something causing that doubt. That's not to discourage keeping an open mind, but erring on the side of assuming that a person has the virtues of a team player is a bad idea. So many times hiring managers look back at the red flags they saw during interviews, the ones they chose to ignore, and regret not taking more time or energy to understand them. While it's never possible to have complete confidence in a hire, nagging doubts about a candidate's humility, hunger, or smarts need to be properly explored and discarded before an offer can be made.