What Color Is Your Parachute?

to them just exactly how you’ve been conducting your job-hunt, and what impressed you so much about their organization during your research, that you decided to come in and talk to them about a job. From there, and thereafter, you can fix your attention on these five questions—in the employer’s form, and in yours.[30]

Incidentally, let’s not leave this tip without observing that these five questions pop up (yet again), if you’re there to talk not about a job that already exists, but rather, one that you hope they will create for you. In that case, these five questions change form slightly again. They get changed into six statements, that you make to the person-who-has-the-power- to-create-this-job:

1. What you like about this organization.

2. What sorts of needs you find intriguing in this field, in general, and in this organization, in particular (as mentioned earlier, unless you first hear the word coming out of their mouth, don’t use the word “problems,” as most employers prefer synonyms that sound gentler to their ears, such as “challenges” or “needs”).

3. What skills seem to you to be necessary in order to meet such needs.

4. Evidence from your past experience that demonstrates you have those very skills. Employers, in these days of “behavioral interviews,” are looking for examples from your past performance and achievement—your behavior—not just vague statements like: “I’m good at…” They want concrete examples, specifically of any transferable skills, work content skills, or self-management skills, i.e., traits., that you claim to have.

You may be asked, or you can pose the question to yourself before you ever go in there: “What are the three most important competencies, for this job?” Then, of course, you need to demonstrate during the interview that you have those three—for the job that you want them to create.

5. What is unique about the way you perform those skills. Every prospective employer wants to know what makes you different from nineteen or nine hundred other people who can do the same kind of work as you. You have to know what that is. And then not merely talk about it, but actually demonstrate it by the way you conduct your side of the hiring-interview.

6. How the hiring of you will not cost them, in the long run. You need to be prepared to demonstrate that you will, in the long run, end up costing them nothing, as you will bring in more money than your salary costs.

TIP #11

Throughout the interview, keep in mind: employers don’t really care about your past; they only ask about it, in order to try to predict your future (behavior) with them, if they decide to hire you.

Legally, U.S. employers may only ask you questions that are related to the requirements and expectations of the job. They cannot ask about such things as your creed, religion, race, age, sexual orientation, or marital status. But, any other questions about your past are fair game. And they will ask them, if they know what they’re doing. (Not always the case.)

Therefore, during the hiring-interview, before you answer any question the employer asks you about your past, you should pause to think out “What fear about the future caused them to ask this question about my past?” and then address that fear, obliquely or directly.

Here are some examples:

TIP #12

As the interview proceeds, you want to quietly notice the timeframe of the questions the employer is asking, because it’s a way of measuring how the interview is going. If it’s going favorably for you, the timeframe of the employer’s questions will often move—however slowly—through the following stages.

1. Distant past: e.g., “Where did you attend high school?”

2. Immediate past: e.g., “Tell me about your most recent job.”

3. Present: e.g., “What kind of a job are you looking for?”

4. Immediate future: e.g., “Would you be able to come back for another interview next week?”

5. Distant future: e.g., “Where would you like to be five years from now?”

Well, you get the point. The more the timeframe of the interviewer’s questions moves from the past to the future, the more favorably you may assume the interview is going for you. On the other hand, if the interviewer’s questions stay firmly in the past, the outlook is not so good. Ah well, ya can’t win them all!

When the timeframe of the interviewer’s questions moves firmly into the future, then is the time for you to get more specific about the job in question. Experts say it is essential for you to ask, at that point, these kinds of questions, if you don’t already know the answers:

¦ What is the job, specifically, that I am being considered for?

¦ If I were hired, what duties would I be performing?

¦ What responsibilities would I have?

¦ What would you be hiring me to accomplish?

¦ Would I be working with a team, or group? To whom would I report?

¦ Whose responsibility is it to see that I get the training I need, here, to get up to speed?

¦ How would I be evaluated, how often, and by whom?

¦ What were the strengths and weaknesses of previous people in this position?

¦ If you don’t mind my asking, I’m curious as to why you yourself decided to work at this organization?

¦ What do you wish you had known about this company before you started here?

¦ May I meet the persons I would be working with and for (if it isn’t you)?

TIP #13

After all this careful, rational approach, I hate to tell you but sometimes interviews are lost for the darnedest reasons, that would not occur to you in a million years. I think of this as losing to mosquitoes when you were prepared to fight dragons. And losing in the first two minutes (ouch)!

So let us look at what mosquitoes (as it were) can fly in, during the first thirty seconds to two minutes of your interview so that the person-who-has-the-power-to-hire-you starts muttering to themselves, “I sure hope we have some other candidates besides this one”:

1. Your appearance and personal habits. Interview after interview has revealed that you are much more likely to get the job if:

• you have obviously freshly bathed; if a male that you have your face freshly shaved or your hair and beard freshly trimmed, have clean fingernails, and are using a deodorant; if a female that you have not got tons of makeup on your face, have had your hair newly cut or styled, have clean or nicely manicured fingernails, that don’t stick out