Career Mentor

Being able to performing at your very best in interviews is clearly essential in the effective execution of a job search campaign. Yet, being very nervous can prevent the interview from being a peak performance episode for you. So what can you do to overcome pre-interivew nerves? Here are some ideas.

1. Some Nerves Are Good. Being a little nervouse, or anticipatory anxiety, is normal adaptive behaviour. It is the natural fight/flight response and will give you a bit of edge. Thus, we just want to reduce the feeling of nervousness to a point where this ‘state’ will not inhibit best performance.

2. Thorough Interview Preparation. Knowing that you have been thorough in your prep for the meeting will give you condidence as will having a plan to arrive at the right place at the right time cool, calm and collected.

3. Shift Your Focus. It has been said that your focus is your reality. What you focus on will strongly influence how you feel. To reduce nerves, focus on positive pictures in three time perspectives. a) Visualise times in the past when you have done really well and relive those experiences. b) See the meeting that you have in front of you flowing in a very positive way. See smiles and approving nods and hear the interviewer saying good things. Hear yourself anwering questions with spot on answers. c) Imagine how you will feel after the interview has gone according to plan. Feel that sense of achievement; allow it to soak in.

4. Shift Your Body. There is a sybernetic loop between you emotions and how you feel in your body. For example, if your emotion is nervousness, you may feel tense, gittery and have a churning tummy. It works the other way too. Change what you are doing with your body and it will change how you feel. Stand up, raise your arms in victory, look up and smile, maybe even jump around. This shift in phsyiology will change how you feel.

5. Shift Your Language. In his authorative work “The C Zone. Peak Performance Under Pressure” Robert Kriegel PhD, discusses the emotional impact of language. Someone who is saying to themselves “ this is horrible”  “I hate interviews”  “This will be a disaster” will not feel great about interviews. Use “self-talk’, as Kriegel calls it, to impact your emotions positively. “I can’t wait!”   “ this is going to be great” “ I do well at interviews” are phrases that you might consider repeating over and over in your mind or even out loud (but not in the reception) before the meeting.

So there we have it. Prepare well, focus on the positves from the past, the interview and after, shift your physiology and use positive and enthusasitic language and you will feel differently. Most of the nerves will evaportate leaving you feeling ready and eager for the interview.

As ever, I hope you have found these thoughts useful and welcome any comments.

A friend of mine was working as a researcher at a leading professional services firm. She drew to the attention of her consultant manager that her workload was such that, despite working fourteen hour days, she would not be able to meet the deadlines for the various reports that she was researching and preparing. The unthinking and uncaring response was “you’ll have to multi-task”. I would offer that no amount of multi-tasking would have helped and in fact there is no such thing as multi-tasking, it is just doing several things at the same time - badly.

In fact, studies have shown conclusively that if you break concentration to do another task it will take you a good ten minutes to return to the same level of focus. Thus any attempt to do several things at the same time is a highly ineffective way to operate.

So how can one improve work productivity and maybe even reduce stress and have more time for other aspects of one’s life? Here are some ideas.

1. On Target Strategy. Ensure that the results that you are working towards are on target for what your boss wants and what the business needs. It would be almost criminal to work really hard at something which adds no value and does not move the business forward.

2. Decide on Priorities. There will be some tasks which will add more value that others. Make those the priorities and work on them first. Ask yourself ‘what is the most valuable use of my time?’

3. Plan Your Time. By working on important tasks before they become urgent, you will remove a great deal of stress from you work life.

4. Work In Blocks of Time. Wherever possible, work on one task at a time. Work with full concentration with no distractions giving your very best effort until the task is complete or until you have taken it as far as you can. This is the time management principle of single handling. It captures the power of focus and it allows you to get into a high performance zone. It will also give you a great sense of achievement and progress which will create a momentum of its own. This is the antithesis of multi-tasking.

5. Bunch Low Priority Tasks. Save all the low priority tasks for later in the day or later in the week and do them in their own block of time. Tim Ferris of 4-Hour Work Week fame, answers all his emails at the end of the day in one session. He does not want to be distracted by ‘noise’ while he is working on his priority tasks.

6. Delegate / Leverage. An expert on time management, Brian Tracy, is clear that you can delegate any task below your pay grade to someone else. Think about what tasks someone else could do, pick the right person to do them, be crystal clear about what needs to be done, how you want it done and by when. Finally, review how the person is getting on and adjust until they are doing it as you want it - perhaps even better that you could have done it.

7. Have Fun and Get Rest. It is easy to get so caught up that you forget to that you need to relax and spend time with your loved ones. This is, perhaps the most precious use of your time. You also need to get rested and re-freshed so that you have energy. Everything is achievable but not everything is sustainable and you cannot be giving of your best is you are simply exhausted.

As ever, I hope you have found these thoughts useful and welcome any comments.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said: “There are no second acts in American lives”. People who have done great things don’t go on to do more. Look at the fall of Tiger Woods - although his story isn’t quite over, it’s not looking good. That said, I’m not sure that I agree with this thought. I have seen plenty of talented people step neatly and with seeming ease from an industry or sector in trouble, to another which was on the upswing, enabling them to continue their successful career with barely a ripple in the water.  During the crash of 2008/09, for example, some left the sinking parts of capital markets business to go into venture capital or into the businesses that they had previously been financing.

How did they do that? How can you replicate their success? Here is my best effort at answering these questions.

Outcome. Become clear about what your desired outcome looks like. It does not need to be overly precise at this point, but what are the key elements? This could cover the sort of job, responsibilities, the kind of firm and the level of remuneration that you want.

Environment. We live in an ever-shifting world. Some view it with uncertainty and others with a sense of opportunity. The terrain is affected by changes in technology, geopolitics and regulations, so take a view on how these drivers are affecting business areas that you could be interested in.

Offering. Ask yourself what value you can offer to the market. This will be determined by your expertise, skills and attributes, and your assets. This may be your ability to lead a team, think strategically and plan accordingly, or indeed, the network of people that you know. Be ready to be able to articulate this value in a compelling manner.

Options. Think about what opportunities are being created in the dynamic of the environment. Change will create stress and pain: the stress of a failing business model; the stress of keeping the products and services relevant to the customer audience; the stress of reacting to moves that the competition is making, and so on. There is likely to be limited appetite to hire if a business is doing well and all is sunny in the garden. However, businesses that are struggling with failure or growth are likely to need to recruit professionals who can add demonstrable value. They are likely to have an urgency. Find the pain points and be ready to offer a solution.

Investigate and Explore. Once you have done the thinking, it is now time to act. Identify firms which are likely to have businesses issues that need resolving. Limited activity will produce meagre results. High levels of activity are likely to lead to a reasonable volume of real conversations that are worth exploring. Shake the tree - vigorously. You may find yourself being included in a recruitment process that has already started. You may get into conversation at a much early stages of thinking and help the managers to shape their thoughts around what needs to be achieved. I have even had coaching clients who have been invited to write their own job spec. Once you have an understanding of the business needs, once you know what the pain point is, then articulate clearly how your expertise can heal their pain.

Be ready for failure. Not everyone will be open to a conversation and not every conversation will lead somewhere, let alone to a job offer. The path to securing a job is opaque and uncertain. Most of your activity will fail. Keep going because the answer is there; you’ve just not found it yet.

Avoid ‘Oneitis’. I have seen some job seekers become enthralled with one opportunity which seems ideal if a little slow to move forward. They pin their hopes on it - the big one. Other activity tails off and time passes and then, you guessed it, the big one fails to come through. Once cash flow, time and momentum have all be lost and crushed by this defeat, it is difficult to crank things up again. 

Decide and resolve. When you do find the right thing it will seem surprisingly easy and obvious. If you have experienced a lot of failures, you might find it hard to recognise and believe that you are actually winning. If there is a real job to be done and if the job meets with your criteria, then take it and resolve to make it a spectacular second act.

This is a horrible situation for anyone to be in. You’ve worked hard to find your new job, you’ve arrived full of optimism and you quickly discover that you just hate it. So what do you do now?

It would be interesting to know how it got to this. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Is it possible that you were not clear about what you wanted from your new job from the outset of your job search?

Was your investigation and due diligence of the firm, the role and the people deep and honest enough during the interview process?

Did you, in any way misrepresent yourself or your capabilities?

Did the people who interviewed you for the job misrepresent the firm, the role or the culture?

The answers to these questions will perhaps guide you as you review your options.

Stay there and make the best of it: Find all there is to like about about this job and see the opportunities that may exist. If you feel that the position was misrepresented, you may choose to use you notes which of course you made after all your interviews and address the issues with you manager. It may be possible to mitigate the downsides enough to make the situation better.

Re-deploy internally: Again address the issue with your manager acknowledging that there has been a misunderstanding and ask to see if it is possible to be redeployed to a different team/department.

Move on immediately: Mindful of how this will look on your CV and dealing with the issue of such a short tenure in future interviews, move on immediately. Tell your manager that there has been an error in the recruitment process. Tell him/her why and leave as politely and professionally as possible You will be able to say in the future that a mistake was made and that you took decisive action to correct it. Of course, never say negative things about this employer, just make it clear that it was not right.

Stay while you look: Realising that you have made an error and you need to go, immediately re-open any other job conversations that you were having, start new conversations and continue you job search from where you left off. When the new postion offers, accept and resign. An example of this was a senior lawyer failed to really understand the culture and values of her future work colleagues. Within an hour of arriving at her desk in the open plan office she realised that they were very un PC and the air was thick with foul language. She hated it and realised the dreadful mistake. She fired-up her job search again that day and left seven months later.

There is no easy answer for this. The options are far from ideal. My best advice would be to avoid the situation in the first place. Be crystal clear about what you want and the sort of environment in which you will flourish and give of your best. Be inquisitive, thoughtful and honest in your assessment all the way through the interview process as you do your due diligence. You will never completely know what somewhere is like until you are inside but these measures will hopefully prevent any unpleasant surprises on arrival.

“Why us and not them?” is a common interview question. The back-end of the question - which is, “and not our competition” - may not be asked but it’s there. This is a great question and is an opportunity for you to shine.

There are a number of things behind this question that the interviewer may be aiming at. Let’s go through them.

First, the interviewer is asking you how well do you know this company. Here, straightaway is an opportunity to shine by using all the information that you gathered in your preparation. This will include: the mission, products and services, the ownership, size, location, values, management team, financial performance and anything in the news. Pick out what you find attractive, why and use that.

Second, you will hopefully have a clear list of the elements that have to be present in any firm and role for you to want to be there. These might be: a mission that you can buy into, a strong management team, a business model that is relevant to its market, great colleagues from whom you can learn, etc. So, in answer to the question you can describe in some detail how the firm, culture and position fit with what you are looking for. I believe that this clarity of thought will be attractive.

Third, this is where you may have to have gone the extra mile in doing your research - you need to be able to compare and contrast this firm with their competition. Obviously, be polite about the competition and be wary of giving opinion that you can’t back up. Go for things which are, as far as you can, factual and axiomatic. For example, you could say: “In the ranking surveys of their equity research product, they rank significantly lower that you” or “they are a younger company and at an earlier stage in their enterprise lifecycle, and I would prefer to be at a film that is in its prime”.

Fourth, this is a fantastic opportunity to sell yourself. Take each element of your understanding of what they are looking for and match it with a result that you have achieved. You are taking charge and making a direct link in their minds between your past performance as an indicator of future success for each of the elements of the job requirement.

Even if they do not ask the question, at some point they will be thinking it. So even if it doesn’t come up, grasp the opportunity to answer it anyway. This is a great chance to show you knowledge, your clarity of thought and ability to compare and contrast and genuine enthusiasm for the role. They will find this compelling and very reassuring.

This can be a question that job seekers will find themselves asking when they eventually receive a job offer. I suspect that if the job was highly attractive then the decision would be easy and, in fact, the question would not even cross the person’s mind. When my clients come to me with this question I often have to investigate a little deeper to help them to come to their own appropriate conclusions. Here are some things to consider: 

I think that opinions of any potential job will be somewhere on a spectrum from: “I will hate it but it’s a job, they will pay me and I will do it,” through to “it’s not ideal, I’ll do it for now but it is ultimately a stop gap”, to “this fits all my criteria and I will love it”.

This spectrum offers two concepts: your criteria for the ideal job and what is the context of your job search journey. Let’s discuss both.

Your Criteria 

When working with coaching clients who are looking for a job, we do a few exercises at the outset to become crystal clear about the criteria of the job that they want and why those criteria are important. Let me give you an example: I had a client who had burnt himself out and truly thought that he would never work again. He had the capacity to apply himself, but had gone way into the red zone and had become quite unwell as a consequence. He came to me having taken six months out to get back on track again. We decided that one of his criteria should be: “The job needs to be achievable and sustainable”. Everything is achievable but not everything is sustainable. This meant that he would need to have sufficient support and a suitable workload so that he could get rest at weekends and remain healthy and happy. Why? Well, because he never wanted to get into the state of health-threatening exhaustion ever again. This became one of the criteria through which he filtered any job that he pursued or was offered. He did in fact turn down a lucrative job offer with a great brand named-firm because he discovered during the interview process that this key criteria would not be met. Happily, a few weeks later he went on to receive another great job offer with even better remuneration and where he would have a small team to help him. This made the job very sustainable and he gladly accepted.

Context of the Job Search

By the context of the job search, I mean how long have you been looking and how successful have you been. You may have been trying to find a new role for a long time and your personal finances are, as a result, under pressure. If this is the case, then it may be that there have to be some compromises away from the ideal and you may have to accept a less-than-ideal position. As a side note, in these circumstances I believe that you owe it to you employer, who has put their faith in you, to stop your job search and focus all one’s efforts on adding significant value to the job at hand. It may be that after a reasonable period and having fulfilled your promise of value, it is ethical for you to start looking again. I was in exactly this situation some years ago; I was out of work and someone came to me with a job offer. There was nothing else available in my field. Therefore, I gratefully accepted and after a couple years of generating significant revenue for the firm, I decided that I had more that fulfilled my promises to add value and it was time to move on.

I encourage my clients to put themselves in a position of abundance by having a number of job conversations running concurrently. I do realise that sometimes this is not possible but is something to be worked towards. Having options gives a major boost to morale and my clients begin to feel that that they are at choice instead of scarcity and neediness. This shift in psychology has a major impact on the way they come across in interview; they seem more attractive as candidates because the spectre of neediness and desperation has gone.

There are some basic things that we can all do to significantly improve our CV so that it becomes an effective career tool. Here are some ideas that might help.

1. Your Promise of Value. Make it easy for the reader to immediately get the way in which you can add value to their business. There needs to be an over-arching theme which gives context to the content. It may be that you are a professional negotiator for very large commercial contracts or a sales person specialising in super yachts or an expert in investigation international financial crime including fraud and money laundering and tax evasion. You can see how easy it is to grasp what this person does in a short sentence. Once you have established the value that you promise, the rest of the document is providing persuasive and poweful evidence that what you promise is true

2. This is a Career Sales Document. This not a deep history of all and everything you have ever done. Frankly, those CVs where the writer feels compelled “to get everything in” are dull and lose the reader’s attention. It is a document designed to create a compelling match between what the reader is looking for and what you have to offer. So make if relevent. Where appropriate use the language in the job spec or ad. Make sure that you highlight your achievements that demonstrate that and which will give you reader the conrfidence that you can do the job that they have in mind. As for the rest of it; thin it down or cut it out. A well structured CV will make it easy for the reader to want to say yes to seeing you.

3.. Your Voice. The CV should be written in a way that you would be describing yourself if you were talking to them directly, albeit in a structured manner. It is sometimes easy to lose the personality in a fog of jargon, achronyms and clichés. Of course, depending on the audience, it does need to be somewhat formal and use industry appropriate language. However this does not mean that you as an individual should be lost.

4. Tell the Truth. No exaggerations, over embellishments or down right lies. You will be found out and it is really really not good for your professional reputation. A friend of mine who is a professional recruiter was working on a senior appointment. She opened the Skype interview in her fluent Japanese and asked the candidate where he had learned to speak Japanese. It was immediately clear that he had lied on his CV. It was not a long call.

5. Getting the Look. The look of the CV is important too as it will create a positive visual impact on the reader. It wants to be dense enough but not packed and not too sparse. Edit it ruthlessly if there is too much text to fit on to two pages. You may choose a one page version. If so, edit down again. Do not got to a rediculously small font size in order to cram things in. Remember we are trying to make this as easy as we can for the reader.

We all spend a very significant amount of our precious time at work and therefore it is important that we really enjoy it. It is likely that when we first got the job, we were thrilled and in love with it: it represented a new horizon, a chance for growth, new experiences and to make a real contribution. However, people often fall out of love with their job and even begin to resent it. 

Here are some steps for ‘falling back in love’ with you job that you might find helpful.

1. Shift Focus: If you are out of love with your job, then it may be that you are focusing only on its negative aspects. What you focus on becomes your reality and if you can only see the bad, then that is what it is. Questions can control what you choose to focus on. So ask yourself: ‘What’s really great about this job that I had forgotten about?” Perhaps go as far as making a list of ten things that are great and do that list for five straight days. This will shift your focus and it will change how you feel.

2. Empower: Many surveys have shown that having some sense of control on one’s fate makes people feel good about their circumstances. It may not be the way that you want it now, but you do have the power to change it for the better. Identify specific issues that you are unhappy with at work and take action to improve the situation. This may mean gaining the cooperation of your manager and colleagues. Create a goal that is realistic and will address the issue(s) at hand.

3. Joy of a Job Well Done: Sometimes we can be in such a hurry to get things done that we can forget to savour and enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done. Forget “multi-tasking” - focus on one thing and work on it through to completion. Enjoy the process, finding solutions and the sense of achievement once it’s done.

4. Perspective: I was recently coaching a client who had decided that he was unhappy with his current employer. We were able to instigate a shift in focus and a new appreciation of all the good things about his job. However, he decided that he wanted to go ahead with a couple of interviews with other firms that he had been invited to. This gave him a real sense of perspective and he decided that he was much better off where he currently is by comparison with the other firms. Gaining perspective can work well, as it did for him.

5. Contribution: We have a fundamental need to contribute beyond ourselves - it makes us feel good. Perhaps it might be useful to reflect on the positive impact that the firm you have chosen to work for has on the lives of its clients and customers. If you connect this to working towards your ‘higher purpose’, you have just flipped on the afterburners! It might also be an idea to find ways to help and contribute to your colleagues. It could be a small act of kindness or helping with some piece of work that they have.

If You Can’t Learn to Love Your Job

There are, of course, perfectly valid reasons for thinking that it is time to move on. It might be that the management has failed to keep the business model adapted to changing circumstances - technology, regulations, geopolitics, competition - and that it will prove to be very difficult to survive. It could also be that there has been a significant change in culture which does not fit with your values. Alternatively, your values may have shifted depending on what chapter of life you are in. If you do decide that it is time to move on, make sure that it is for well-considered reasons and not because you have forgotten why you loved you job in the first place.

A great job that you would otherwise be really enjoying can be ruined by difficult colleagues who can make life a misery. Handling difficult co-workers effectively can turn around a toxic environment and can be an opportunity to build your leadership skills.

Here are some ideas that might be useful: 

1. Ask yourself if their behaviour is ultimately just a low-level annoyance which, although mildly irritating, can easily be ignored.

2. Get some honest feedback from trusted advisors about your own behaviour. Are you part of the problem? Are doing anything that you are not aware of that is provoking or exacerbating the behaviour from said difficult colleague(s)?

3. If the behaviour is persistent and has a sufficient level of negative impact on you - or indeed other members of the team - then it is time to have a conversation. Pick a time and a place where you will not be disturbed. It is important that you don’t do this publicly and thus embarrass the person, which will likely provoke a hostile reaction. It may also be unwise to react in the moment and to say something in a state of heightened emotion.

4. Rather than charging in and venting your frustration with them, seek first to understand. Ask the person what is going on with them from a place of genuine interest and compassion. They might be dealing with health, family or other issues, which is affecting their behaviour. Be sure to listen and see things from their perspective. Listen, appreciate and respect what they have to say.

5. Ask them if you can share your view. Come from the frame that you want to express what is going on and what to collaborate in finding a solution that works for all parties. Try to separate the behaviour from the person and let them know from your perspective what the behaviour is, how it makes you feel and what the impact is on you and, perhaps more broadly, the team and its efforts to achieve the business’ objectives.

6. It may be useful to spend more time on looking forward. The person cannot change what has been said and done but they can adjust their behaviour going forward. Try to suggest and agree what that future looks like in terms of their behaviour. Ask for their solutions.

7. See how they are reacting to what you are offering during the conversation and observe if they make any effort to improve the situation.

8. If there is no improvement or indeed if it gets worse - then be prepared to escalate by discussing the problem with your line manager and/or HR professionals, letting the person know that you will be doing this.

I have heard it said that you get what you tolerate in life and in many ways this is an exercise in establishing boundaries and making it clear what is and is not acceptable.

Receiving a rejection after a job interview can be difficult to deal with. It can be very disheartening and take the wind out of your sails, to the point where it is challenging to move on. Softening the impact and shortening the recovery time is critical in an effective job search strategy.

Here are some great ideas for how to not only cope with rejection, but to also enable you to bounce back faster and more hungry than ever.

1. Know that it is going to happen, maybe a lot: During a job search, especially in a competitive market, you are highly likely to get rejected from one role or another. It is probable that this will happen at least a few times, but it’s important to understand that you only need one yes for the job that is right for you. Just knowing and anticipating that it is going to happen will build your mental strength.

2. Operate from a place of abundance: Clearly if you are only pursuing one or two jobs and one of them rejects you, the psychological impact will be greater than if you have five or six job conversations on the go. Therefore, it is important to work hard on an effective prospecting plan so that you have plenty of opportunities to chase. Furthermore, if you do have an abundance of job conversations, you will simply not have the time to be upset about one rejection.

3. Control what you can control: Do not expend your precious resources of time and mental energy on things that you can’t control. For example, you cannot control the quality of the other applicants, how well your skills match the brief, how well you fit with the company culture, etc. Thus, focus on what you can control. This would include your level of preparation, the effort you put into rehearsing answering questions, the state that you are in when you arrive at the interview, and so on. Focus on being at your very best.

4. Talk it through: Speaking with a friend or mentor following a job rejection can help lift your mood. Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto to talk to.

5. Learn the lessons: Think through the interview(s) that you had with that organisation and see if there are any areas where you could have done a better job. This is not an opportunity to beat yourself up. Once you have identified any lessons, think about how you can incorporate them into you preparation for your next interview.

6. Put a time limit of feeling down: It’s natural to feel a little down after a rejection but wallowing in that emotion is very counter-productive. Give yourself a time limit and once time is up, immediately start taking massive action to move yourself forward.

It is sometimes a good idea to do something in an interview that will make you stand out as a candidate in a highly competitive job market. One tactic that I have seen done, and occasionally suggested to my coaching clients, is to prepare a succinct but well-informed plan or presentation to be delivered during an interview. This is usually most effective after two or three rounds of interviews when you have a more accurate view of the scope of the role, the resources available and the company’s goals and challenges faced.

Preparing a presentation or plan can be a great idea for several reasons.

The first is that it is proactive. Explaining your skills and achievements in response to the interviewer’s questions is reactive. You will have anticipated questions and prepared and rehearsed your answers, but you are still waiting for the necessary prompt. By contrast, a presentation is proactive and turns the interview into more of a conversation.

Second, it puts you in control because you are driving the presentation. You now have an opportunity to showcase your achievements and capabilities, some of which may have been missed if the interviewer didn’t happen to ask the questions you were hoping for.

Third, a well-delivered and well-informed presentation will make you stand out. Very few, if any, of your competitors will be doing this, so you will be more memorable to the interviewer.

Last, interviewers will try to gauge if you can do the job that they are recruiting for by using a past as an predictor of future performance. Your presentation can complete that arc by offering ideas about how you would solve business issues going forward - future pacing.

So, what are the elements of such a presentation? Well, that depends on what it is you want to demonstrate. For example, one former client presented his investment methodology by working through an example of a particular stock recommendation. Another put forward some ideas of a sales strategy designed to improve the firm’s sales performance over an 18-month period. It is important to go with a scenario that would be typical, and thus relevant, for that job role - whether this is selecting a stock, planning an event or managing a project.

Here are some headings that might be useful in thinking about how to plan your interview presentation:

The result sought

The context of the issue

The opportunity that the situation affords and the resources available

The plan

Potential hurdles and mitigation

Summary

Your presentation can be delivered verbally or with the help of visual aids - a printed and bound document or a powerpoint presentation. 

However, delivering such a presentation may present some pitfalls.

Its essentially proactive nature may seem to some interviewers to be presumptive. Thus, offer the idea in a tentative manner, not ‘When I get the job...’.

Be cautious about making assumptions about the role in question. Stay within the remit of what has been described to you by the firm and what your research has shown you.

No interviewer wants to be told how to run their business, so make sure to stay between boundaries.

Be modest about the resources that you assume you will have to solve the problem. This will make it clear that you are commercial in your thinking.

When considering finding a new job, if you have been made redundant or indeed are simply looking for a new position while still employed, there are several things you can do to significantly enhance your chances of finding the role that you are looking for. 

Have a Coherent Brand Message 

We define brand as a promise of value. 

You need to construct a ‘promise of value’ based on your accomplishments, qualifications, etc., and the value that you can add. This coherent brand message in turn needs to be communicated accurately and consistently via: 

Social media (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) 

A well-constructed CV and bespoke cover letter for each role you apply to

Your reputation in the market place / the way you conduct yourself 

The value-add messages that you convey during an interview 

Be Clear about What you Want 

Before you even start researching firms in your industry and sector, having an idea about what it is you are looking for in your next role and firm is important. This will give you clarity and avoid fuzzy thinking. 

Target the Right Companies 

Target firms that fit with what you want in terms of: 

Size 

Brand 

Values 

Culture 

Point in its corporate lifecycle 

Gather Intelligence and Target Decision Makers 

You will need to get in front of the key decision makers who are responsible for recruiting to their organisation. You can understand who they are by speaking to your professional network, researching online (including on LinkedIn) and de-briefing recruiters who focus on your area. 

Once you have this information, you can then make either a cold or warm call to the right decision maker, or you can follow up on job advertisements posted on job boards or the company’s website. 

Seek to Find the Right Match, Not Just Any Job

It’s important to find what works for you and not just what is available at the time of your search. 

Be ready for Tough Questions

Anticipate awkward questions that you may be asked during the interview such as “Why were you made redundant?”; “Your CV says that you have moved around a lot;” Why are you looking for a position here?” 

You can read more about such ‘Trip Questions’ in this blog. 

Be Prepared for Rejection 

A job search is a chance to look afresh at what it is that you want from your career.

1. The first point is to become really clear about what you want to do. In particular, it's important to think about what you enjoy. You're more likely to be both happier and successful if you enjoy the work you are doing! Ask yourself - where do your passions or interests lie?

Write an exhaustive list and then circle the non-negotiables that have to be present in the role and the firm for you to accept the job.

2. Secondly, look at the skills you have acquired over time, and at how you enjoy applying these skills.

Think about your nature - Are you a manager? Or a real entrepreneur? Or are you an artist, a doer?  

The Entrepreneur seeks to match a product to the market, takes the risk, finds the funding and assembles the team,  

The Manager manages the resources including the capital, team and finance.  

The Artist or Doer is the accountant, the lawyer, the photographer all creating and innovating the product or marketing it or supporting that activity.  

It's important to not be something that you don't enjoy being; if you don't like managing people, don't apply for a managerial role!

3. Having thought about what kind of role you would excel at, take time to consider who you would want to work with. Consider what fields interest you, and thereafter, think about what industry, sector and sub-sector you could thrive in.

4. Next, it's important to research what specific companies you would want to be a part of. Research them online to see if they fit your criteria. It's important to consider who their audience, clients, and consumers are and whether you are happy to serve these groups.

You must be ready to articulate precisely how you can add value to this business. Not only this, but you should also be ready to provide evidence that tells them why they should believe you can add value to their firm.  Make a claim and then prove it.

5. Once you've done this, list your network of former colleagues, friends, university contacts - anyone that you know is connected to any of the target firms on your list - and get in touch to see if they can get you an introduction.

Alongside this, look at job boards (both commercial and company ones). Speak to recruiters and see if there are any jobs going at any of the target companies on your list.

As I start working with my coaching clients many of them express the frustration they have had trying to work with recruiters as part of their job seeking efforts. Often, there seems to be a sense in some way they HeadHunters and recruiters should be working for the job seeker. This would include showing them job opportunities, thinking “out of the box’ and advising the job seeker on how to “re-purpose” their skills and experience and be availble for a chat over coffee. I think that, for most part, those days are gone.

There was a time when businesses seemed to have plenty of budget for hiring, there were relatively few recruitment firms and there was a lack of transparency about who was where. This meant that recruiters could really add value by finding the talent in an opaque market and bring the candidates over the line for a successful hire.

It seems that most market anomalies will eventually get ironed out and this was certaninly the case in the recruitment business. The expense of hiring forced businesses to find ways to cut costs. Most businesses stopped paying retaining fees at the outset of assignments and they squeezed the recruiter’s fees. They inventivised their staff to recruit their maket contacts into the business and in some cases they created their own internal recruitment teams thus disintermediating the role of the external professional recruiters.

This shift was compounded with the advent of LinkedIn. Suddenly the market for talent was less opaque and a key way, possibly the key way, in which recruiters could add value was removed. The over all effect has been that much of the recruitment service has been commoditised (and I suspect undervalued) by the businesses they serve.

This, of course, is not uniformly true. True head hunters who focus on hiring senior leadership positions have been less affected by these trends. Shareholders, partners and senior management still need to be able to demonstrate due process and fairness in the hiring process. There may also be times where a particular business area is booming and the competition for talent requires specialist recruiter skills and knowledge. There might be occasions when a fim wants to keep their search for a certain senior position secret for commercial reasons and again this is where the right recruiter can help.

That said, most recruiters are under the cosh. There is no time to focus on anything but candidates that fit closely with the assignments that they have in front of them right now. Meeting job seekers with a view to knowing about them for future assignments is a waste of precious time, as is acting as an informal career advisor.

If you are a job seeker and you are not being contacted by recruiters despite having a great LinkedIn profile and an extensive professional network, it is probably because your profile does not fit closely enough with the active assignments in the market. You are probably better advised to cultivate relationships with the decision makers in your target list of firms. They will be very interested in meeting you if they see that you match a role that they have in mind. 

The advent of new technology has brougth the opportunity for millons of people to work remotely and indeed many enterprises have designed their business model on this preimse. Some of this is good and there are some challeges. Here are 10 things that you may not have thougth of.

1. Time efficient. Working remotely is time efficient for two reasons. First, you will save hours of your life by removing your commuting time. Now some people enjoy their commute and use the time well but most find it stressful and it will use up significant amounts of time. Second, if you can be disciplined and work in highly focussed periods of concentrated time, your level of productivity will soar.

2. Cost efficient. No commuting means not paying for expensive rail tickets or car parking etc. Furthermore, your company can now pay for less office space or no office space and thus save the firm a significant chunk of overhead.

3. Carbon Footprint. Some studies suggest that remote working will reduce a person’s carbon footprint by up to 98% which is a magnificent thing for climate change and planet health.

4. Management Style. Some managers have found it difficult to adapt their management style to allow them to manage remote workers effectively. There is a good deal about this subject on the internet. Suffice to say that is important for both the worker and the manager to agree a system where both parties are clear about objectives, time frames for delivery and quality of work and the feedback mechanism.

5. Isolation & Culture. One of the downsides is that remote workers can begin to feel detached from the collective effort of the enterprise and may lose a sense of drive that they once had to help fulfill the misson of the firm. Compounding this is the need for most people to need to be in the same physical space as others, something for which sitting in brand name coffee houses is a poor substitute.

6. Mix of In and Out. To mitigate the last point, some firms organise places and times when all their remote workers can get together to re-connect with each other and the enterprise’s mission and forster the culture. This can take the form of a once a week/month meeting comprising training, objectives session and some social elelment. Other examples are conventions which are more  of a jamboree with prize giving and motivational speeches.

7. At Home Lifestyle. One major benefit of working at home is an opportunity for a better balance between work and home life. This does however require discipline to spend focus work time on working. It can sometimes happen that a partner will see their partner working at home as a chance to load them up additional family tasks. I am not a family expert but clearly there is room for awareness and negotiatioin here.

8. Proximity & Networking. Going to events such as professional conferences and just being in the same space as other people in your busines area is invaluable for keeping abreast of market developments and networking. Clearly, both of these can be done on-line as well but I would suggest that there is something powerful about proximity.

9. As Life Changes. As your life changes and perhaps your values and priorities shift, you may decide that you want to work remotely and harvest all its benefits. This may require going into a new field entirely such as telesales, developing an on-line business etc. Technology has give choice and there is often anothe way to achieve our career objectives.

A job description will either be presented to you by a recruiter or it will be in a job advertisement that you are follow up on. 

There are a number of things to be done once you’ve laid hands on a job spec. 

First steps - Research

Improve your knowledge of the firm beyond the short descriptive paragraph that is often found in the job spec. It’s important to have a more sophisticated and informed view about the company and what it stands for (including knowledge of its products, services, location, ownership, etc.). 

Seeing through the fluff

It’s important to understand that job descriptions are often the result of a template cookie-cutter system; this is in some ways understandable because it allows for greater consistency. 

However, this system can hamper really getting to the essence of what the requirements for this role are. This is where your analytical skills come into play; look carefully at the language used, highlighting and underlining the key points made that inform you exactly what the core requirements of this job are. 

A fault with many job specifications I have come across is that they have used ‘impenetrable terminology’, terms that mean something to the writer but nothing to the broader readership. Beyond the cookie-cutter template that has been filled in, you want to dissect, analyse and draw out the very essence of what they are looking for: this will probably boil down to 3-7 points.

These 3-7 points might be difficult to get out due to the use of vague generic terminology or jargon. Nonetheless, if you can pull it apart successfully, then at least you have a chance of understanding whether what you have to offer will really fit.

From this point, you are in a position to assess how closely what you have to offer matches what they are looking for. 

Most job specifications also come with a small paragraph about the company. It is thus good to do some research into what the company is all about (products, services, location, ownership, etc.) so that you can put this job spec into a more informed context. 

Preparation is absolutely pivotal before any important interview. Whilst interviews can take unexpected turns, there are some key things you can do to prepare beforehand to make sure you arrive in the strongest possible position.

1. Know how you match the company’s requirements 

From the brief that you have been given by either a recruiter, the person specification in the job advertisement, or simply by anticipating what they might want, you need to have clear, articulate messages about what you have to offer that match with what they want. 

2. Research the firm and who you will be meeting 

You can find an exhaustive amount of information about the firm you are going to interview with on the internet or by asking carefully-selected people in your professional network. 

There are some basics you need to know: 

Products and services 

Locations 

Size

Management team 

Basic financials 

Ownership

Anything in the news 

Furthermore, if you know the name of the person that you will be meeting, see if you can find any relevant background information about them - through your network, Google, and importantly - LinkedIn. 

3. Have questions for them 

We think that having questions prepared for them is important. This gives you a chance to display the research that you’ve done into the company, and that you have an inquiring mind. You can also ask questions that will let you know how closely this job and firm fit with your criteria. 

See this blog for more details on this. 

4. Anticipate and inoculate “issues”

If you think that there are ways in which you do not match their brief, or you are concerned about aspects of your career history (such as frequent moves, etc.), anticipate these and have answers ready for difficult questions from the interviewer. 

One way of dealing with these issues is to mention them upfront at the beginning of the interview, so they are brought out and dealt with there and then. 

5. Admin 

Turnout - Ensure that you are dressed appropriately for the culture of the organisation and that you present yourself in a good way. 

Turn up - Know where you are going, leave plenty of time for your journey, and arrive on time in a relaxed and composed state of mind, with your answers, key messages and questions at front of mind.