Double Journey

I read a great tip on how to ace a second interview.  You have done well enough to be asked back for a second interview.  Normally a second interview is a serious sign that you are seriously being considered for the job.  Often times, you actually already have the job and the interview will be used as an opportunity to sell you on the potential job.  This is especially true in competitive industries or for very talented people.

But how do you ensure that you will get that job offer after your second interview.  The secret is to pay good attention during your first interview and ask the right questions.  You should leave your first interview with the following knowledge

• Why are you hiring this position?
•  What are the problems you are facing now and how do you want someone in this position to help out?
• What would you consider to be success in the first 30,60,90 days?

After you get these answers, you should prepare a plan on how to address all these issues.  Make sure you talk to your future boss and explain a plan on how you would address all these issues.  This does a few things for you.  First, it shows you are paying attention.  Second, if the plan is good, it shows you can think through the challenges and you can actually do the job.  Third, and most important, it is going to get your future boss envisioning you in the position and you can discuss reasons why or why not your plan will work.  As soon as you start having this dialog with your future boss, s/he will already be thinking of you in the role, and will be more likely to give you the job.

What do you think?  Does this sound like a rational plan?  Do you have other ideas on how you should approach a second interview?
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I look at resumes all day so I can be pretty critical.  But some people just do things I don’t understand.  Case in point, putting a advanced degree on your resume that has nothing to do with the job you are seeking or the career that you have had to date. Now this doesn’t apply to your undergraduate degree.  Everyone understands that you likely majored in something that has nothing to do with your current job. This was true for me as I majored in Economics but now work in technology.

But a graduate degree is something different.  First off, you made the decision to go after a graduate degree is totally voluntarily.  While technically getting an undergraduate degree is too, an undergraduate degree is basically a requirement for almost any white-collar job in today’s world.   Not only is it voluntary but a graduate degree is also very expensive and time consuming.  I understand that you may be proud of the degree.  I understand it may show you can work and study hard.  But if you got one, but aren’t using it, I’m going to want to understand why.  It goes to my assessment of how and why you make important decisions.

Now even if the degree is on your resume, it might not be a death sentence.   What is a death sentence is having a bad answer to the next question, “Why did you pursue this degree and then end up not using it?”  There are a number of OK answers to this question.  None of them involve you telling me that, “I just didn’t know what else to do” or “I needed to grow up”.  Both responses I have heard.

I will grant two exceptions to this rule

• You have a gap in your resume you can’t explain any other way.  A gap is worse than having an irrelevant degree.  However, it is only slightly worse since I may assume you just took some time off for family issues.  This is a path I usually won’t (and can’t) go down too far.
• It is your first job after you got your degree.  This you should explain away by being honest.  Either you have discovered you don’t like what you went to study or you can’t find a job in that field.  Both are acceptable answers. Just don’t expect me to pay you for the advanced degree that is irrelevant for the job.

So what do you think?  Is it a good idea to put your advanced degree on your resume even if it is irrelevant? If so, under what circumstances?
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Most people probably think going to an interview is hard.  For me, this has never been the case.  I’ve always been able to do well in interviews thanks to the fact I stick to my basic interview tips.

But the thing I’m finding to be very difficult is to find good interviewers.   I think most people are worse at being the interviewer than being on the other side of the desk.  What types of problems do I find?

• Not going to the interview prepared
• Not asking relevant questions
• Not reading the job description
• Having no goal in mind on what they want to discover about the candidate
• Being non-committal in their feedback (not able to give a strong hire or no hire)

I think the problem for most people is that most people are never trained in how to give a good interview.  People are just told to go to the interview and ask questions.  So they ask questions that are not very good or or so general that they provide very little value.  Questions like, “Are you a good listener?”  How is the candidate going to answer anything but “Yes!” to that?

I’m not saying everyone has to be a great interview.  People just should not be put in that situation if they are not prepared for it.  I blame the company more than I do the people giving these bad interviews.  What do you think? If you interview people, did you ever get any training?  If not, how did you learn to give interviews?
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My organization is going through a very important change recently.  It was decided that the hiring practices for the technology organization were poor to say the least.  We did not have uniform job descriptions and the interviewing techniques left something to be desired.

I’ve been one of the people tapped to help bring us up to standard when it comes to these deficiencies.  I’ve had a lot of experience at other bigger companies and am considered the expert at my company in my specific dicipline (since I’m the only one here with my job).  I’ve been working with a consultant to come up with a job title and core competencies for my discipline.  I’ve also worked with her to come up with a list of standard interview questions that can be used by others so they know the types of questions they may want to ask when evaluating things like leadership, empathy, and dealing with ambiguity.

She sent me a list of questions to review and set up a meeting for us to discuss.  In the meeting, she asked me for my feedback on the questions.  I replied, “They are good.   In fact some of them are really good.  I think you did an excellent job coming up with questions that really get to the heart of the matter.  It’s not easy coming up with quality behavioral interview questions.”

It turned out that she based most of the questions on a list of interview questions that I sent her.  It was a list of interview questions that I personally used when evaluating candidates.  So in essense, I basically gave myself a pat on the back.
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I am trying to hire a new Project Manager to work for me.  I have several people in the interview loop ranging from Developers to Product Managers.  One of the developers I have on the loop is notoriously difficult.  He is a very bright guy and often comes up with very difficult questions.  I told him his purpose in the interview is to judge the technical competence of the Project Managers.  While I don’t need the project managers to code, I do need them to be able to talk competently to all sorts of people, and having a good technical background is key.  The question, which I don’t really want to type out, was a logic based question that any person, with no knowledge of programming, can get but it does test your ability to reason and explain your reasoning.

The feedback he gave on a few candidates he has seen has been mostly poor.  Few if any of the candidates have been given a thumbs up because nobody has really answered his questions adequately.  Curious, and maybe a little crazy, I asked him to give me the same questions.  The theory being that assuming I can do my job correctly, if I can’t answer the question then perhaps it isn’t really a fair question to be asking.  Of course, I’m setting myself up becasue if I can’t answer the question, the question may in fact be fine, but I’m just not good enough to do the job of the person beneath me.  Kind of a losing proposition.  But hey, I’m not really afraid of my limitations, and I am pretty sure my job is secure.

Lucky for me I got the question right.  Not only did I get the question right, but I answered the difficult follow up question that he told me almost nobody gets, not even the best candidates.  So I felt a little bit proud of myself for that. Good thing to know I can pass an interview loop of someone who would be below me.  Of course this poses another dilemma.  Just because I answered it doesn’t make it a good question.  It doesn’t mean that you can’t do the job adequately just because you can’t answer it.  But perhaps I should bring a few more candidates in just to see if someone really can pass this seemingly tough interview, and then judge how strong of a candidate the person really is in comparison.
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Today I wore a very nice green shirt to work. I actually got complimented on it several times today. To one of my co-workers, I mentioned that it was the same shirt I wore to my job interview for that company. I then told him how I wore it for the specific reason that it was green, and the company’s corporate color is green. I was trying to play a Jedi-mind trick by showing the people who were interviewing me that I was “one of them”.

It must have worked because I got the job. I’m sure it had nothing to do with my qualifications, it all had to do with my great green shirt. But it got me thinking about things I do when in a job interview. Here are some of the basics.

• Look the part - Dress up. I don’t care if it is a casual environment, come looking like you mean business.
• Come prepared - Nothing turns people off more than you not knowing something about both the company and the industry
• Ask questions and listen carefully - You can almost always tell the answer someone is actually looking for by the way they react to you. You need to size up your interviewer. Figure out what they are in there to figure out about you and what is important to them. Focus on that.
• 90% of the time, it isn’t what you say but how you say it - I’m always told I interview well. It really isn’t what I say, but the fact that I speak well and confidently.
• Agree, A LOT - This is something you should do in general when trying to convince anyone of anything. You should almost always agree with someone, even if you disagree. By that I mean you need to find something you agree with in what they are saying or at least make it known that you understand or empathize with them.

And of course, wear a shirt or blouse that matches the corporate colors.
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