Dear Hiring Managers and HR Teams:

Can we get together on something?

We need to rein in the interview process. It’s gotten out of control.

I know you want to keep your beloved culture intact, but sheesh…

It’s not uncommon for candidates to go through an initial phone/video screening, pass several rounds of interviews, take psychology assessments, be instructed to put together an engaging 20-page pitch deck and present it to a panel with a Q&A, meet the senior leadership team, take a tour, problem-solve real-world issues on the spot, and… since interviews now take 8 hours instead of one these days, have the nerve-racking, forced smile experience of eating lunch with their evaluators.

Did I leave anything out?

This process can take up to 3 months (several weeks minimum), peppered with last-minute requests, changing job requirements, cryptic instructions, unexpected disappearing acts from HR, and straight-up ghosting.

And then, after all of this — after weekends spent away from family building a PowerPoint presentation, after rehearsing answers to ridiculous but pervasive questions like “tell me 3 of your weaknesses,” after sleepless nights from fearing the tech interview, after scrubbing the web for “out of the box” exercises, like “tell me how many marbles it would take to fill a school bus,” after 20+ firm handshakes with eye contact, after setting up a professional-grade Zoom studio, after all the followup notes, the tracking in Excel, the time off work, the money for parking, the dry cleaning, the power breakfasts, the mental health debriefings with friends…

After all that…there is no job offer.

For 3 months, this candidate has made your company their life.

They’ve given you their best ideas, their best performance, their best times slots, not to mention serious professional, financial, and emotional expense.

And then its, “Sorry, you’re just not the right fit.”

And you know what’s coming next, you know the question they have for you, their last hope at taking something from this whole disappointing experience: the humble request to know why.

You will inevitably give them one of two canned responses:

“We found someone with more experience.”

OR

“You don’t have enough _____________.” (Something that’s usually obvious from looking at the resume.)

Yeah, I know you’re playing your cards close to your chest to avoid a discrimination lawsuit, but seriously, c’mon.

At the very least, after taking so much of someone’s time and ideas, can’t you at least guide them a bit, as you boot them out the door?

Nope.

It’s “Buh-Bye,” and sometimes not even that.

If you’re a candidate reading this you’re nodding your head. If you’re a hiring manager, you’re shaking it.

An uneven equation, to say the least.

You, the employer, leave with more knowledge of who you need for the position, strategic plans for where to take your business, inside info on other companies, a broader understanding of the talent pool that’s out there, and sometimes free labor!

And the job candidate? They leave with the false hope that “maybe another position will open up and we’ll call you.”

Yeah right.

You hold all the cards. How about a little compassion?

How about paying these folks if you’re going to have them work for you?
How about a probationary period instead of a 3-month interview?
How about looking at their past presentations instead of asking them to create a brand-new one for you?
How about letting them eat lunch alone?
How about treating them like a fellow member of your industry who has value separate of working for your company?
How about taking a little risk and making a better educated guess.

If you must see a benefit, think of this as a business opportunity.

People talk, especially people who don’t get the job.

Why not have them walk away loving the company instead of resenting it?
Why not have them wishing they could have gotten in vs rationalizing why you suck?

I’ll tell you this: the company that designs the first-ever respectful, energizing interview process is going to have an influx of applications and a massively robust referral network amongst people inside and outside their walls. And your new hires are going to love you all the more.

You’re not just filling a job requisition, you’re spreading the word. Whether you want it to be or not, your story is seasoned by the whispers of your detractors. You’re not privy to these conversations.

And you don’t know what you’re missing.

Layoffs & Loyalty

Twitter, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce… titans of Tech, supposedly too big to fail.

But we’re seeing some wavering. And employees are certainly feeling the quake.

Inflation is taking its toll, the global supply chain is still screwy, and consumers are pinching their pennies. As a result, profits are down, even for the big guys, and the #1 strategy of public companies to keep dishing out shareholder dividends is to cut the workforce. And fast.

Tens of thousands of workers are being laid off, in some cases 10%-50% of the workforce.

If you’re not lucky enough to be above the fold, you may find yourself dumping your desk tchotchkes into a cardboard box with an unrequested escort to the front door.

It’s not enough to work hard and be loyal.

When the chips are down, your salary can always be rescinded.

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Part of protecting yourself is knowing this to be true and taking precautions to be ready for when it occurs.

1. Stay to the outside. If you’ve got some tenure under your belt, love what you do, and want to call your own shots, consider shifting to consulting. Self-employment is the only true job security because you, and you alone, are in charge of your paycheck. As long as you keep a balanced portfolio of clients (3 or more clients, 2 or more industries), you will always be safe from being out of work.
2. Sleep with the enemy. Get to know folks in your role at competing companies. Don’t gossip or trade trade secrets, but have lunch every once in a while. Welcome someone from the other side into your life. You’ll be better able to see the industry trends coming around the corner, you’ll have a bigger picture when doing your own work, and you just may have some inroads into a new job, should your company decide to downsize…er, rightsize… no, I mean consolidate… Wait, restructure?
3. Toot your horn. Everyone in a big company knows they have to find ways to add value to survive, but you also have to find ways to prove you’re finding ways to add value. This means, telling your boss your good ideas *and* making sure you get credit for them, volunteering to do “high-visibility” projects, making post-project slide decks that show business impact, and reminding people of your greatness during meetings and reviews. Don’t count on anyone else to advocate for you. It’s not that your colleagues don’t care; they’re just as busy as you are and they can only fit one horn in their mouth.
4. Interview every once in a while. Especially when things are good, dip a toe in the job market. See what’s out there for you. See what salaries look like. Guage the eagerness of another company to snatch you up. This is a good way to make some alliances within other companies and turn enemies into friends, which is always a good business strategy (and life strategy). Interviewing is a skill. And you should always keep your skills polished.
5. Keep your resume sharp. Military veterans and Information Security professionals are great at this. Perhaps it’s because they know bombs can drop at any moment. There is no better way to gain peace of mind in an unstable job situation than to have your resume updated and ‘at the ready.’ At the first explosion, you’re ready to fire back. If you really want an edge, hire a professional resume writer to do the job for you. It can be challenging to get your story down on paper, especially after an involuntary, abrupt ending.

Life is uncertain. Companies have plenty of failsafes in place to protect them from sudden catastrophes.

Do you?

Robots to the Rescue?

Everything’s automated now. So why not automate the process of building a new resume?

The benefits are obvious: a resume. And fast. You enter a few action verbs and phrases, pick a template, and presto, the resume gods spit out a brand-new resume for you. As a resume writer, I thought about building something like this. I still might but I always come back to the same reasons why I don’t think it’s a good idea.

They can hurt more than help.

Who Needs Them

If you’ve got a linear career path with no job gaps or short-term jobs, and your most recent position and company are directly relevant to the job you are targeting, then a resume builder should be fine for you. You should catch the attention of recruiters and HR folks easily. Well done toeing the line.

Another scenario where resume builders work well is if you’re applying internally. That is, a job opened up at your company, and you need a resume to apply for it. As long as the people doing the hiring know exactly who you are, then it’s not such an imperative that you wow them with words on your resume. A slight caveat, though: you may be surprised how little people know about what you do, including the colleagues you talk to every day.

Who Should Avoid Resume Builders

Resume builders don’t allow you to pick and choose where to put content, such as titles, company names, dates, education, certifications, and skills. You’re stuck with a template. The template decides which foot you put forward first, and that can mean a dangerous step in the wrong direction.

For example, if you have a job gap or a short-term gap, having prominent dates could be a problem. If your job titles don’t match up with the industry, showcasing titles might trip you up. If you just got a groovy new certification, but the template forces you to put it at the bottom of the resume, under your education, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Resume-builders don’t allow you to have subheadings, sidebars, case studies, and other callouts in your Experience section. It’s tricks like these that help to tell an accurate story, visually and literally.

Another big gripe about resume builders: they rarely offer the option of creating a summary section. You’ll usually be allowed to create a massive keyword list, which is critical, but you won’t have a nice juicy intro on your resume saying who you are and what you’re about.

This leads me to the biggest issue with Resume Builders…

The content comes from you.

You’re already struggling with what to say. It’s hard to know what to include and what to leave out, what to infer and what to explicitly state.

No resume builder is going to help you with this.

Alternatives to Resume Builders

There are a few paths you can take to free yourself of the burden of building your own resume (or outsourcing to a bot).

1. Use job listings. Pick out 3 target jobs with the exact same title at different companies and analyze the crap out of them. Highlight common keywords and come up with a short list of the highest priority job duties and qualifications (i.e. whatever they list first). This content should be on your resume. Pro tip: used a word cloud tool to see what keywords and phrases pop up the most.
2. Talk to a hiring manager. They’re the ones who have all the answers. If you don’t already know someone who has hired for your specific position, line up an informational interview. Then ask this person what they’re looking for. Get the answers to the test. Then you’ll know what to say on your resume.
3. Take a course. Consider enrolling in an online class about building resumes. Just make sure there is a part in the course about overcoming specific work-history challenges you may face. For example, if you have a job gap, you’re going to need to figure out how to deal with that on paper.
4. Hire a resume writer. Ever tried to fix your own car or toilet and ended up with a bigger mess than when you started? The same is true with your career. Keep it in good hands, expert hands. With a good resume writer, all you have to do is talk about your jobs; they’ll know what to include and leave out, how to say it so the hiring folks will be pleased, and where to put everything on the page so that the readers’ eye is directed in the appropriate sequence.

Sometimes a robot can’t do a human’s job. When it comes to mapping out your career and telling your life’s story on 1 or 2 pages, resume builders are usually going to come up short. It’s tempting to want to believe you can magically create a winning resume with the click of a button, but…

If your career runs a path that is anything but straight and narrow, think twice before you push that button.

Getting let go from work is like getting hit by a bus.

And like getting hit by a bus, people who get fired, laid off, or asked to leave often experience PTSD (post-traumatic-stress-syndrome). I see it more often than you might think.

The symptoms show up in one’s work history:
–extended time off
–private consulting
–gig work
–sudden or serial entrepreneurism
–underemployment

A common behavior amongst people with Job-related PTSD is complete and total avoidance of an intentional job search — like a batter avoiding the batter’s box or a veteran avoiding loud noises or a driver circumnavigating busy intersections.

It’s understandable. It’s a smart reaction to a bad experience: the brain saying “hey that sucked. Let’s not go through that again.”

But it abbreviates your life. It makes you take U-turns that keep you from certain roads.

To break free of job PTSD, you have to confront it. (Ghosts hate it when you give ’em a name.) Talk about it, replay the crap-ending to someone who loves you and supports you. No need to deconstruct it or overanalyze things, just pull it into the light and let your emotions go where they go; you’ll probably cycle through quite a few of them.

Then go back before that ending and remember the good stuff too. And if it was always bad at that job, go to the one before it.

You’ve got victories; you’ve just forgotten about them. They’re obstructed. The ghosts are in the way.

Once you get them to move, you’ll see all the roads again. And the intersections will be clear.

Sometimes, we get ourselves talking and we forget where we’re going. Or we don’t know what direction to talk in or how deep to dive.

You’re not alone.

It’s difficult to figure out how much you should say at any given time in a job interview. And with the prevalence of video interviewing it’s become ever harder to judge how people are receiving what you’re dishing out while you’re dishing it.

So how do you know what to say, how much to offer, and when to say it? Continue reading this entry »

Astonishment filled the room.

“You mean I’m… prejudiced?”

There were about 35 of us. It was a resume writer’s conference on the East Coast. Tons of us sat in high school desks, the kind where the seat is attached to the desk part. (There was something wrong with the real room we were supposed to be in. Maybe it helped: feeling like cavalier high school students who thought they knew everything.)

Two women of color stood at the front of the room, blocking a map of the world. One of them had a headband on, her hair poofing up and spilling over it like a fountain. The other had a shaved head with large hoop earrings.

“Surprising isn’t it?” the hoop-earringed one said.

“Don’t hate yourself,” the other instructed.

The exercise worked. We were all prejudiced. Biased. Racist. Whatever you want to call it. Didn’t matter our color, our age, our gender. We all played favorites.

It’s a tough moment: recognizing that you’re not innocent, that you’re part of the problem, even though in the conscious world you are typically and emphatically part of the solution.

The exercise? Simple.

A list of first names with blank space next to them. We were to write down the first thing we thought of as we came to each name, just take a moment to crystalize what formed.

Giggles filled the room. Smiles. Not the good ones, the nervous ones, the coverups. Hands raised, calling over the facilitators to ask questions. From what I could overhear, they were looking for some nuance, an angle to insert into the exercise, to lever their way out of the discomfort.

I knew they were uncomfortable. Because I was uncomfortable.

I’d been writing resumes for years. I love my clients. I want the best for them.

And just like a hiring manager, I look at the resume before I see the person. Indeed, I prefer it this way. I enjoy figuring out who they’re perceived as before I actually get to know them for real. I didn’t realize I was doing some perceiving of my own.

There I was, reading a simple list of names, counting some out and counting others in. I could tell who I’d hire just by my comments in the right column, that and the ease with which those comments came to me. We didn’t need a discussion about it. It was all internal. Our brains were guilty.

A woman at the front of the room asked what we were all thinking: “So what do we do now that we know we’re all racists?”

The room laughed but we couldn’t have been more attentive in that moment. Everyone wanted to know.

The facilitators beamed. This was the whole point of the exercise: to bring us here, to let us dig our own holes, to show us we’d been digging for years, so they could tell us how to get out.

“You can’t pretend you’re not biased,” one of them said. “Life has made you biased.”

The other one piped in: “It’s a survival instinct. Don’t hate yourself.”

“Right.” They looked at each other. Then back at us.

“Instead of fighting the fact that you’re biased, accept it, be aware of it, sit with it, and, most important, try to stop the action that wants to come out next.”

“You might even say ‘stop’ out loud.” She held up her hand.

“Exactly. Whatever it takes. Pause.”

I raised my hand.

“How do you know when you’re in the clear?” I asked. “To act, I mean.”

“Awareness is a powerful thing.” The one with the headband took a step toward me. “Awareness opens the door to empathy. Once you’re aware of what you’re doing and the impact you’re having, your conscience will call on you.”

The other instructor smiled so broadly her earrings moved. “And I’m sure everyone in this room would agree…” Her teeth glowed like the fluorescent lights overhead. “No one wants to be a racist.”

Everybody knows tech companies struggle with diversity. But don’t we all? Even companies with the best intentions seem to become colorless as they grow.

In particular, I’m talking to white people, the ones, by the math of it all, who are doing most of the hiring. It’s hard when intention doesn’t lead to the outcomes we seek. It’s hard to be called a racist when your heart is in the right place.

If you truly want a spectrum of America in your company, you have to be very pragmatic about it, you have to do some things that may go against your grain, that just don’t feel right, at least at first.

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Take Yourself Out of the Equation.
You may be a great at hiring. You may have great ideas, but it’s likely you don’t know Continue reading this entry »

Everybody’s doing it.

Even before COVID-19 struck the world, employers have been relying on virtual interviewing to screen out candidates. It’s inexpensive and way less time-consuming. There are several types of video interviews employers use. Make sure you’re savvy in all 4 of these formats. Continue reading this entry »

As a former recruiter and professional resume writer, I’ve looked at a lot of resumes. I can tell you this: people seem to struggle with knowing how, where, and to what extent to include Responsibilities and Accomplishment on their resumes.

Most people have one or the other, the coffee or the cookie. Some have both, a 2-course delivery. Neither of these strategies is optimal.

To show you why Continue reading this entry »

Most interviews start with the same question (which, actually, isn’t even a question):

“Tell me about yourself.”

Why?

Because open-ended questions are the best way to get to know someone. And, they’re the easiest way to allow someone to reveal themselves.

The question is simple enough, yet most people answer it incorrectly. Continue reading this entry »

What is it about resumes that they’re still around? Aren’t we well past the era of using 1- to 2-page documents to represent ourselves?

I’m a professional resume writer and I’ve been ready for the traditional resume to die for a while now, like a king in his castle looking down onto the battlefield at his battered and bruised knight, so proud but bracing for the inevitable.

But the knight just won’t go down. Despite all the swords blazing and shots being fired, the trusty-rusty resume keeps swinging.

There have been numerous attempts to take down the resume, to relieve it of its decades-long tyranny over the job search, but nothing has been victorious.

Here are some of the more modern sharpshooters that have promised to dethrone the chivalrous resume: Continue reading this entry »

There is a common misconception that the only purpose of the resume is to get you an interview. You’re short-changing yourself if you believe this.

I’ve watched resumes do many more things for job seekers, time and time again. Here are some of those things. Continue reading this entry »

Is anyone hiring?

Not really. There are, indeed, industries and companies that are going strong, but they’re not necessarily adding to their headcount right now. Everyone’s in waiting. HR departments are in an Arctic freeze. People with jobs are clinging to them like driftwood in the cold open sea. Unemployment numbers are rising, which means the competition for life rafts is growing.

It’s hard to be cooped up in your house, knowing all of this is going, feeling like you should be “out there” looking for work.

Still, it’s always better to take action during a crisis. Action delivers a sense of progress. It fans the flame of hope in the night while we pray for the sun to come back over the horizon.

Here are some ways to stay productive and generate your own warmth in this time of uncertainty: Continue reading this entry »

I had the privilege of engaging an HR panel who took the time to share what they wanted to see (and did not want to see) on a job candidate’s resume. Here’s what they had to say: Continue reading this entry »

Recessions tend to push hardworking people into two groups. On the one hand, is the layoff survivor handling the load of multiple former employees. On the other is the hyperqualified, abruptly laid-off job seeker who needs to explain the abrupt ending to their tenure. Different destinies but both types tend to struggle with how to present these career changes on their resumes.

Here are some tips: Continue reading this entry »

People always ask for a list like this so here is some age-old advice to help you prepare for your interview. These are extremely basic tenets that apply to almost everyone looking for work. Continue reading this entry »

Had to dig this one out of the archives…

KQED called me up to be the San Francisco Bay Area career hero on the California Report with Scott Shafer. Scott let me use his own career as an example for how to use seemingly irrelevant work experience as an asset, not a liability. We also discussed taking a different approach to networking, and some of the things that employers look for in job candidates.

Check out the podcast; they even included the original take which has plenty more advice for people looking to beat a tough job market. Continue reading this entry »

Here’s an interview I did for a blogger, asking me some popular resume questions on behalf of her fellow graduates-to-be.

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Let’s start with the most common Resume question: Continue reading this entry »

I admit I’ve had a couple of challenging clients recently. It’s easy to write them off but it’s always best to look inward before casting blame.

So, what’s really going on? Continue reading this entry »

As a seasoned professional, you have much to offer but remember to make room for new experiences as well.

An effective resume will balance your strengths (i.e. what you can teach) with your areas for growth (i.e. what you can learn). In regards to the latter, I’m certainly not suggesting you claim ignorance. Rather, consider showing a recently developed interest in a new industry or field.

This is best done by illustrating how you’ve already Continue reading this entry »