Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door (21 page)

“Shhh,” says the other guy. “Don’t make trouble.”

What do we do when the game is lost? We sulk. We pout. We grouse. We sow sour grapes. When we’ve lost out in a job search, it’s “How could that company be so dumb to hire her instead of me?”

Hey, that’s human nature. The only people I know who smile and hug the winner when they’ve lost are the forty-nine non-Miss Americas in the annual Miss America Pageant. I should know because I was a judge in 2001.

Here are two utterly unconventional but totally intelligent reactions to rejection.

Let’s say you’re an outside candidate for a job. There’s a grueling competition. It takes weeks to resolve the search and you . . . lose. Call up the winner, congratulate him or her on the victory, admit the defeat stings, and then ask a favor. Ask that person if he or she would be willing to have lunch with you and to share anything he or she could that might help you use this setback as a learning experience and to prepare yourself for your next job search. You don’t want to probe into why you
didn’t
get the job. You know the company chose wisely. You only want to better understand the makeup of a successful candidate.

I once met an electrical engineer from Spokane playing tennis in Arizona. He knew his ohms and volts as well as he did his lobs and aces, but he had spent a long, long time on the bench between jobs. Finally, he reasoned like an engineer and said to himself, “When an experiment doesn’t work in the lab, what do you do? You research why.” So, he got in touch with the last two victors in the beauty contests where he was runner-up. Both meetings were worth their weight in Whartons.

After each meeting, he debriefed himself as soon as possible. He noted the smallest details: How they answered questions, how they dressed, what their goals were, their educational and career experience, what they emphasized and de-emphasized. After following up with thank-you notes, he used what he had learned to fine-tune his own presentation and bring it into line with what the marketplace was buying. In his first interview after his meetings, with the right attitude and the current buzz straight from the winner’s circle, he landed the job he holds today.

Firms that don’t hire you will
never
give you a straight answer. They’re afraid, and not without some sad experiences along these lines, that telling you “we thought your answers were evasive,” or “your personal style seems incompatible with the boss you’d be working for” would expose them to the possibility of litigation or, at best, bad PR. But it’s a different story when you talk to a successful job candidate. It’s as impossible for the new hiree not to tell you why he got the job as it is for a lotto winner not to tell you how he picked the winning numbers.

Another very different reaction to defeat is to market the extensive research you have just acquired to a third party. Imagine that Company A has picked someone else in a contest where you were a candidate. During the interview process, you learned information that suggests that a rival—Company B—could have a real opportunity. Perhaps Company A is discontinuing a product line that leaves the market open to Company B. Maybe Company A is going to have serious problems managing a particular district because of pending staffing switches.

In the past, you might have approached Company B, and it could have told you it wasn’t hiring. If you present your newfound information to Company B simply as rambling commentary, you are likely to be written off as an opportunistic chatterbox. However, if you map out a meaty business plan that is several pages long and includes how you could help realize this opportunity, it could be a very different story. If Company A hears about this gambit, its current management will almost certainly never hire you in the future. On the other hand, it didn’t choose you, so what do you owe it? And who’s to say that its current management will be in place two years from now? This tactic has risks, but what opportunity doesn’t?

 

 

 

What’s the #1 way to differentiate yourself during the job interview? How do you make yourself stand apart from other highly qualified candidates? Your clothes, your handshake, your aura of confidence, and your professionally formatted résumé all matter a great deal. However, nothing counts more than how well prepared you are for the substance of a job interview.

Spending a few minutes studying a firm’s Web site is hardly enough. You have to dig deep and learn what’s important to the person interviewing you. What are the company’s business objectives? How is it reacting to the latest industry issues? What is its competition doing to win new business? What is the background of the person you’re meeting with, his or her personal values, and his or her business responsibilities and goals?

Sam Richter, president of SBR Worldwide and senior vice president/ chief marketing officer at ActiFi, is a guru on being prepared. He is one of the better finds I have made in my business career. As one of the nation’s premier experts on sales intelligence, Sam’s
Know More!
training program teaches executives around the globe how to find information and then how to use it to gain an edge in sales, business development, and account management. I know the Sam Richter approach works because he has made three presentations to our sales force at MackayMitchell Envelope Company, and our company uses his system. We enthusiastically support what Sam does. His expertise may be one of our best kept secret competitive edges. Beyond the business relationship, we have also become good friends.

According to Sam, the most important sales call you’ll ever go on is your job interview, and I couldn’t agree more. The same strategies and processes used to win multimillion-dollar business agreements, when employed correctly, can help you win your next job.

In Sam’s award-winning and top-selling book,
Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling: Know More Than You Ever Thought You Could (or Should) About Your Prospects, Clients and Competition
(
www.samrichter.com
), he describes the reasons most buyers buy. At least in the first couple of meetings, buyers don’t “buy” a company’s products or services (note that the “sell” in those first one or two meetings is usually the opportunity for a future meeting and/or the opportunity to submit a proposal). Instead, buyers are buying the salesperson—this person’s knowledge and ability to solve problems. Buyers are asking themselves, “Does this person understand me, my company, our unique issues, and how to make my job/life easier?”

This is even more true in the job interview. The buyer, the person conducting the interview, is already interested in your “product or service”—your résumé—or he or she wouldn’t be talking with you. What the buyer really wants to know is: “Do you understand
my
and my firm’s issues, and what relevant experience do you have solving similar challenges?” The interviewer is asking himself or herself the same questions as a product/service buyer.

When I meet with a job seeker for an informational interview, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had people confide in me: “I’ve spent the majority of my career in the same industry. . . . How can I possibly compete in a new industry where I don’t have experience?” My response? That’s an excuse! Stop trying to sell your “product”—your résumé, which is nothing more than a listing of your past work history. Instead, focus on the other person and
his
goals. Your résumé should just be a guide for discussion. Use it to tell relevant stories. Remember, what the “buyer” wants is a relevant and experienced problem solver, so
learn about the other person’s issues
and show how you can be the one to deliver solutions!

Sam has developed a variation of his
Know More!
sales training program title,
Know More! Job Interviews
, in which he discusses how to find information to ensure relevancy during the job-search process. In it, Sam contrasts two sample job interview opening statements:

Standard Interview:
“As you can see from my résumé, I have 15 years of experience in the financial services industry. I have a career record of continual promotion; I’ve always received great reviews from my superiors; and clients consider me a friend.”

Know More!
Job Interview:
“I was doing some research on your industry, and it seems like a big issue your company faces is that government regulation is limiting the ‘perks’ you can provide prospects. Thus building relationships is tougher and tougher. Is that true? I thought so. As you can see from my résumé, I have 15 years of experience in the financial services industry, and none in the medical device industry. I’m a smart person so I’m guessing you can teach me what I need to know about the medical device industry in a few months. However, it would take you 15 years to learn all that I know about solving the exact business issue you face—building meaningful prospect and client relationships in an ever-increasing regulatory environment.”

The standard interview puts the focus on the candidate’s background and lack of relevant
tactical
experience. In the standard interview, the candidate actually guides the interviewer down the path of concluding that the candidate doesn’t have enough industry expertise for the job. Unfortunately, it’s the typical opening remark I’ve heard in hundreds of job interviews.

The
Know More!
job interview actually reframes the discussion. When the interviewer looks at the résumé, the natural thought process is to focus on the lack of relevant industry expertise. However, with the
Know More!
approach, a couple of things happen:

In the
Know More!
job interview, the résumé is used as a guide to tell relevant stories. “Let me tell you about a time when . . . ,” “We had a very similar experience that I helped solve when I was at . . . ,” “I can completely relate to that issue, and in fact, I faced it dozens of times when I was . . .” The résumé is no longer a potential negative; rather, it leads the interviewer into asking questions where the candidate can completely be impressive with his or her knowledge and problem-solving experience.

In Sam’s book, he states, “A cold call is not just when someone uses the phone to make a sales call on potential prospects.” According to Sam, “Anytime you meet with someone—whether it is a prospect meeting or an existing client meeting—and you’re unprepared, you’re making a
cold call
. When you don’t know what’s going on in the other person’s world, what they care about, what their issues are, what their personal likes and dislikes are, then you’re cold calling.” When you go on a job interview, are you going in
cold
?

The goal is to learn as much as you can in a reasonable amount of time about the other person and then figure out how you’re relevant to something that interests him or her. As Sam puts it, “When you do that, you’re going to have a
warm call
, in which you position yourself as credible, where you’ve captured the interest of the other person, and where you can ask great questions because you already understand a bit about what’s going on in the other person’s world.”

A cold job interview isn’t just cold at the start. It leaves you and the interviewer cold at the finish. A warm
Know More!
job interview defrosts the doorway. It turns practical research into an enticing opportunity.

In his book, Sam shows how to use free or low-cost tools to access information on companies, industries, and people. Whether it’s effectively using popular search engines or accessing data via the “Invisible Web”—the 90 percent of Web pages that search engines don’t access—the information that you need to know more, the data you need for warm interviewing, is out there if you know where and how to look.

To learn Web search secrets you probably never thought possible (and that, in fact, are a little scary), and to learn the magic of warm calling, visit “Sam’s Warm Call Resource Center.” While at the site, you’ll find a continually updated list of business information Web sites and search tips, and you can download Sam’s “Warm Call Toolbar” so you can access business information resources directly from your browser. (I bite my tongue as I share this tidbit. It’s the risk you take when you relay a choice secret. I can only hope my competitors don’t pick up Sam’s book.) Although designed with the salesperson in mind, the Warm Call Center’s principles can be applied equally well to the job-search process because it makes finding information prior to your job interviews easy, fast, and fun.

Following are just a few of the search tips you’ll find in Sam’s book. They will improve the efficiency of your Internet skills and help you to prepare for job interviews with more relevant background:

Google Timeline Search:
Type the name of a company in Google. If the company name is more than one word, put the name between quotation marks (e.g., “acme corporation”). On the Google results page, just under the Google logo on the left side, you’ll see a link that says “Show Options.” Click on the link. This allows you to sort your Google search results using a number of criteria.