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Archive for May 11th, 2006

More Job Interviewing Tips

These articles are all over the web so again, if you are using the in-person interview as step 2 in your sales hiring process please stop. You are giving up information too easily for a savvy candidate. Better to withhold specific information and see what types of skills they have for extracting that information. They may search the web, ping their network or ask you direct questions. You learn far more with this approach.

CareerJournal.com writes about candidates talking too much in an interview. Interviews are strange and stressful events. Most people do not sit in many meetings where they are interrogated and then judged regarding their own personal abilities. The side effect is stress.

This scenario can play out in a biased manner when the interviewer has an introverted style (High S or High C) and the candidate has an extroverted style (High D or High I). Essentially, the extroverted style needs to start talking to formulate their response. This natural approach for them does not lend itself to a succint, direct answer which most introverts value. If too much weight is placed on this style topic from an interview, a good candidate often is discarded. Good point to remember, extroverts need more words to make their point so expect to hear more stemwinders from them.

The author then discusses candidates who appear to be “too rehearsed, too prepped.” Caution here – if you are using a contingent recruiter and you are seeing rehearsed candidates . . . well, put 2 and 2 together. Contingency agreements (recruiter gets paid once you hire a candidate) are riddled with danger.

The contingency agreement incents the recruiter to get their candidate in to your position before another contingent recruiter. Even if it is just one contingent recruiter, they have a monetary interest in making their candidate appear strong enough to get the position. We have heard of recruiters who debrief their candidates by asking what questions were you asked? The recruiters then turn around and feed those questions to their next round of candidates to prep them. An insidious approach for sure.

One last takeaway from the article. The author mentions that 7 days is an acceptable amount of time for a decision on an offer. That seems quite long. If you are running a process with strong qualifying, the offer should be nothing more than a confirmation of agreed upon principles. Just my thought.

Top 10 Cities for Career Advancement

Readers of this blog know that we are suckers for lists. This one popped up today and had to be shared. One thought, the author mentions that the government’s OMB office has split up towns like Raleigh-Durham in to two separate towns. This seems strange – especially living in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul. At any rate, here are the top 10 with links to Forbes’ explanation for their ranking:

1. Albuquerque, NM 6. Phoenix, AZ
2. Raleigh, NC 7. Nashville, TN
3. Houston, TX 8. Durham, NC
4. Boise, ID 9. Fayetteville, AR
5. Knoxville, TN 10. Indianapolis, IN