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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

1. INTRODUCTION

2. HOW THE INTERVIEWER SEES IT

Appearance / presentation

Enthusiasm

Open/friendly

Confidence

Sense of humour

Honesty

Personality / fit / attitude

3. GETTING THE MINDSET RIGHT

Dislike of performing

The problem of honesty

Over-trying

Under-trying

Nervousness

4. PREPARATION

5. WRITTEN APPLICATIONS

Resumes and CVs

The purpose of a resume

Resume content

Cover page

Personal details

Overview

Relevant skills and experience

Educational qualifications

Professional experience

Responsibilities

Achievements

Hobbies and interests

Referees

The cover letter

Social media presence

Summary

6. FINDING THE WORDS

Asking yourself questions

Preparing the answers

Answer in the first person singular

Make comment

Use humour

Speak from experience

Passion

Analysing features and benefits

Summary

7. MAKING THEM REMEMBER YOU

Primacy and recency

Mental images

From the known to the unknown

8. PRESENTING THE WORDS

Body language

Voice

The pitch

Eye contact

Do not rush

Gestures

Summary

9. WHAT DO THEY LOOK FOR?

Skills

Experience

Qualifications

Achievements

Ability to communicate

Appearance

Honesty

Stability

Enthusiasm

Leadership

Teamwork

10. THE INTERVIEW

First stages

11. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Why you?

Whispering death

List questions

Tell us about a time...

12. STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

Strengths

Weaknesses

Where do you see yourself?

13. ENDING THE INTERVIEW

14. SOME EXTRA ADVICE

Group interviews

A word to older jobseekers

A word to jobseekers from other cultures

A word to jobseekers with a disability

15. A FINAL REMINDER

1. INTRODUCTION

Current selection processes are not, and never have been, about the best person for the job, or about ability, skills, or the desire to work.

What I want to do is show you the underlying logic of my advice, so that it makes sense to you. In this way, you can make informed decisions about how you are going to approach your next selection process. Perhaps explaining where it all comes from will help you decide how much to trust it.

Some years ago I was working as a placement officer with an employment service. As you would suppose, a placement officer’s main task is to help people into work. This involves advising unemployed people and linking them with employers. At the time, I was assisting a group of people who were, in the main, good decent folk with good skills who were keen to work, in some cases desperate, but were not able to get jobs.

Personally, I believe that skills and desire should be enough credentials to put people in work. If you have the skills and the desire to work you should need nothing more. Perhaps the desire and the willingness to get the skills should be enough. I had people with the skills and the desire who were not able to find work. At the same time, there were others who were getting work with the same skills and the same desire. Sometimes people with fewer skills and less desire were getting work. Some people would reluctantly say, ‘Oh well, I guess I’d better get a job.’ And they’d go out and get one. But I had people desperate to work who just couldn’t get anywhere.

This is just not right. There is something inherently unfair here.

What was the difference between the two groups? Clearly, it was not ability or the desire to work. The difference was solely in the way they approached the selection process. Those who could write sexy resumes and interview well, got jobs; those who could not, didn’t.

This is possible because current selection processes are not, and never have been, about the best person for the job; nor are they about ability, skills, or the desire to work. They can’t be; there is no way of knowing from current selection processes who is the best person for the job. Interviews are about, and can only ever be about, who appears to be the best person for the job. From an interview, we can only tell who interviews best.

The only way to be sure the best person gets the job would be to give each applicant a trial in the job and see who perform best, an unlikely and in some cases impractical solution. If the best person does get the job through current selection processes it is simply coincidence or good fortune. It is not a result of the process itself.

The implications of this are enormous. Let me spell it out. The value that you take into the selection process as a person and as a worker is intact at the end of the process because it was never tested on the way through. I cannot sum up your value as a person or as an employee from a resume or from the twenty minutes, forty minutes, or the hour that an interview takes. Neither can anyone else. It is rubbish for anyone to think that they can.

Do not fall for the trap of measuring your own value through this process. I see people trying to get jobs at one level and not succeeding, trying at a lower level, not succeeding then trying at a lower level again. Why? Their ability to do the original level was never tested; only their ability to play this silly bureaucratic game called the selection process. Don’t ever attach your self-esteem to this process. To do so is to attach a power and legitimacy to the process that it does not merit.

If you are not being successful in getting the jobs you want, do not start applying for lesser jobs. Instead, start learning how to play this game. Recognising that interviews are not about the best person for the job changes your task at interview. Your task is not to be the best person for the job. Your task is to appear to be the best person for the job. There is a significant difference.

The fact that current selection processes do not work is actually well accepted in industry. Recently a one-question questionnaire was given to thousands of human resource officers around the world. It asked simply, ‘Would you fill your next job vacancy better by your current selection processes or by sticking a pin in a list of applicants?’ Seventy per cent voted for the pin. Really!

They know current selection processes do not work. Consequently, organisations dabble with other forms of voodoo. Group interviews and psychological testing spring to mind, both of them hopeless and not proven to be any better at finding the best candidate. But these processes have created an industry that makes a lot of money.

I cannot for the life of me see how anyone can think that you can fill a vacant position better by conducting a group interview. Luckily, they are the easiest of interviews to coach people about and I have almost a hundred per cent record of getting people through them. I will show you how to approach them later in the book.

I like Myers-Briggs testing better than I do horoscopes. Myers-Briggs has sixteen different personality types, but horoscopes have only twelve. That has to be an improvement, right? I know someone who sat a Myers-Briggs test two weeks apart and came up with two completely different results. At best these tests can indicate a person’s mood on the day they take the test; at worst they are nonsense. To use them to decide who should fill a position and who shouldn’t is simply crazy.

The fact that selection processes are a game is not new. We ask, ‘How did you perform at the interview?’ recognising that it is a performance, an act, a game that we play. It is not real life. My problem all those years ago was that I had a whole lot of people who did not know what the script was. How can you perform if you don’t know what the script is? How can you play this game if you don’t know what the rules are?

I made it my mission to find out what the script is, what the rules are. After being fortunate enough to get funding to research this, I sat in on over a hundred different selection processes, covering as wide a range of industries and occupations as possible. Private sector, public sector, community sector, junior and senior, skilled, unskilled and professional jobs all came within the scope of my research. If I could get there when they first opened the applications and stay in touch with the process until they made a decision, I did. Often the people conducting the process did not understand why I was there. They would say things like ‘While you’re here you might as well make yourself useful and sit in on the interview’. But if I could get out of participating, I did. I know how I choose staff – I was interested in how other people did it.

This point is often lost on people in the industry. Professional recruiters may have placed thousands of people in work but all they learn is what influences them personally. What influences other people may be quite different. This may explain to recruiters why some clients get angry with them for sending the wrong people. What the recruiter values and what the client values can be very different.

If this research sounds even remotely exciting, it wasn’t – it was one of the most boring things I have ever done. The lessons that I learned, I learned very quickly and I didn’t learn a lot more after the first twenty or thirty processes.

But two things I learned very quickly:

What they say they want and who they
choose are often very different.

In large organisations, the things they say they want are called selection criteria and you are usually required to address them. In small organisations, what they want lives only inside someone’s head, ‘What I’m looking for is…’ But in both cases what they say they want, what they may truly believe they want, and who they eventually choose are often different.

I coach according to how they choose and not what they say they want. For this reason, some of my advice may seem controversial and contradict other advice you may have received. I can’t help that, but I will try to give you the underlying reasons for my advice.

There is a script to interviews.

It is not quite as easy as saying ‘open sesame’ and doors start opening but across industry and across occupations I heard the same types of questions asked time and time again. Each and every time the same answers were considered to be good answers and just as importantly the same bad answers were considered to be bad.

I have witnessed some poor individuals being interviewed on more than one occasion, some as many as four times. They are asked a question, the same question they were asked last time and the time before that and I hear them giving the same answer—the same answer that did not work on any of the previous occasions. As an observer, I think, ‘Come on now, you know that answer does not work. It didn’t work last time or the time before, or the time before that. What? Today’s going to be magic, is it? Today is going to be the day when you have found someone who is actually looking for this answer?’ It won’t be, and they will fail again. People are not stupid; they can hear themselves giving the same answer and they see the same lack of response from the interviewers. This is a fast track to complete lack of confidence.

Why do they do this? Because they do not know the script. They do not know any other answer. Those of you caught in this bind know how debilitating it is. You know that the answer does not work even as you are saying it. You need to learn the script.

In this book, I will detail the script as best I can.

A journalist came to see me for help after he had failed an interview for a job on a major daily newspaper. He told me about the question that caused him the biggest problem, and how he answered it. I told him his approach was all wrong, then told him how I would have answered. He smiled and said; ‘I didn’t know you had a background in journalism.’ ‘I don’t,’ I said, ‘other than a vague general knowledge. What I do have is a background in answering questions.’

Here’s another example showing that interview skills can be learned and that the interview process can be turned to your advantage. I was coaching a bricklayer for a position as a trainee council building inspector. He was doing an evening course to gain the necessary qualification. It was particularly important for him to interview well, because he was trying to make a career change from outdoor trades work to an indoors technical and administrative position, a transition that is difficult to achieve. We worked together for about eight hours, which is a long time to coach someone for an interview. It was a hard grind, but suddenly the penny dropped; he understood. He grinned, and said confidently, ‘Ask me a question; any question!’ I asked one of the questions we had been practising. He answered well, then said, ‘Ask me something we haven’t practised.’ I tried some new questions and he handled them well too.

I was very pleased, but he went further, insisting, ‘Ask me a question about any job!’ I tried him out, saying, ‘You are going for an accountant’s position and you get asked the following question…’ and then, ‘You are going for a job as a child-care attendant and …’. In each case, he gave a good answer. Of course, he did not have detailed knowledge of the jobs outside of his field, so a lot of the technical details were invented and wrong, but the basic structure of his answers was sound and compelling.

Successful interviewing is a skill that can be
learned and improved with practice.

The next week he got the job from a field of six applicants. He told me later that if I had gone for the job I would have beaten him. I know nothing about being a building inspector but I know a lot about selection processes.

A word of warning. I have coached people into jobs they’ve lost a short time later. I can help them past the interview, but I can’t give them the skills to actually do the job.

I am more than merely cynical about selection processes – I just do not understand them. I see no logic in their basic premises.

A company has a vacant position; it advertises the position and more people apply than they need. How do they choose who is going to get the job? They hold a competition. They call this competition an interview and the person who interviews best is the person who gets the job – even though they will never use those skills again. The skills you use at interview are relevant nowhere else but at interview. So, they decide who gets a job by testing one set of skills and then give the successful applicant a different set of skills to perform for the rest of their working life. You see why this does not make sense to me?

I sat in on a series of interviews for a motor mechanic at a large Ford dealership. I thought this was nonsense. Why didn’t they just say, ‘Here is a car that needs a new clutch. Put it in and then we’ll check your work.’ This would get them straight to the best candidate. They can interview and get the most articulate motor mechanic but why would the person who talks best be the best mechanic? I’m sure there are plenty of good mechanics are not articulate at interview.

After I collected all the information in my research I put it together in book form and the rest, as they say, is history. It became a number one best seller. I was on TV, on radio and in the press. Having my fifteen minutes of fame was fun, if a bit scary for someone who is naturally an introvert, but my deepest satisfaction is all the letters and emails I get from people saying how much the book helped them to achieve their personal goals. They now understand how to play this game and just as importantly understand that it was never about their value as a worker or as a person. It was only ever about their ability to play this game we call the selection process.

A few surprising things happened. On the good side the book has travelled well. I know it has helped people into jobs in America, Japan, Canada, England, Ireland, Germany, India, the Middle East, as well as Australia and New Zealand.

One of the bad surprises was hate mail. Real hate mail! It came from people working for large private employment agencies who charge their clients $10,000, $50,000 or more to find someone to fill a vacancy. It is my contention that sticking a pin in a list of applicants will deliver no worse a result, and if I’m right, $50,000 is a lot to pay for someone to use a pin. Clearly I hit a nerve.

One large private agency ran a graduates’ forum to introduce their company and get new graduates to sign up with the agency. A friend of my daughter attended. Apparently one of the graduates stood up and said they found my book very helpful. Staff from the agency countered by saying that they did not think my book was any good at all. A short time later my publisher told me the same large agency had bought a hundred copies of my book. In public they denigrate me, privately they would not be without it.

I suppose I will get more hate mail after this edition, but this time I’ll also get it from people who run group interviews or conduct Myers-Briggs tests. That’s life. But if you are thinking of sending some, I’ll regard it as a badge of honour, so don’t bother.

If this were a book on how to play tennis you wouldn’t expect to become a better tennis player just from reading it. You would expect to learn how to practise to develop your skills. In the same way, you should not expect to be better at the whole selection process the minute you finish this book, but you will learn how to improve with practice. Remember that if you are unhappy with the way you are currently performing, but are not prepared to make changes, then you can’t hope to improve. With all change comes risk, but with persistence will also come reward.

A word to those in the industry…

I know that for many of you who earn a living from helping others into work, particularly those jobseekers with disadvantages, this book has become your standard text. I have met many of you who have attended my training. I feel strongly that we are colleagues in this field and I deeply appreciate the work that you do. Your work is very different from those who receive a fee for filling professional vacancies.

Having said this, I am critical of many of you. It seems to me as an outsider looking in that many of you constantly consider the hole rather than the doughnut. As a group, you tend to be a fairly sober, bordering on pessimistic, lot.

I think I understand the reasons behind this industry malaise. Most of you are very busy and have limited time and resources to assist each individual client. When you do help someone get a job, the satisfaction lasts for a fleeting moment because that client has gone – out of sight, out of mind – and your attention is drawn back to the never-ending queue of people still needing assistance. No wonder the burnout rate in your industry is so high.

Let me tell you something for nothing. For as long as you are in the industry, and no matter how hard you work, that queue will always be there, and you will never get to the end of it. There will always be people who need your help. If you keep concentrating on that queue without recognising your value to those who have successfully moved through to work or study, you are heading for that burnout pile. Ease up. Be kinder to yourself!

You do not have to be an expert in every single job and every single industry in order to help people. Nobody is. I am certainly not. You do need some expertise in resumes and interviews—in the industry of getting work. That is all, and it is enough. It is not your job to get your clients into work. It is your job to help your clients get themselves into work. Their problems are not your problems; your job is to help them with their problems, not take their problems on your shoulders. You are a helper, not a rescuer.

Some of your clients have shocking resumes and are hopeless at interview. Why? Because these are not their skills – these are your skills. Without your intervention, some of your clients will continue to hurt themselves by presenting themselves poorly through the selection process until they lose hope and become despondent. For some of them you are the only intervention available. Without you there is only more of the same bleak future. But you will intervene, and your help will be a valuable service to your client and community.

It amuses me to know that one of the best strategies you have for re-motivating clients is cynicism. Become co-conspirators with your clients. The system is stuffed. It is not about the best person for the job; it is about who appears to be the best. Conspire with your clients to beat the system.

It is not often that cynicism has a positive side but in this case
I know of nothing more powerful.

Good luck!