Follow up by Phone

Many clients tell me that they follow up with employers by email after job interviews. They also seldom get a reply.  Here’s a better strategy: Use the phone.  While it is possible to dodge a message as easily as it is to delete an email, a phone call carries more weight.  The interviewer hears your voice and remembers that you’re a person.  Better still, if the interviewer picks up the phone, you get the chance to ask questions and engage the interviewer.

An email message is passive, and it gives you no chance to ask questions or answer them.  Some clients think they are being polite by using email.  Think about it this way: You took the time to interview with a company.  Don’t they owe you the respect to reply to a phone call?

Know what you want to say when you talk to the interviewer.  The key question is: “Are you still considering me as a candidate?”  If the answer is yes, ask when the company expects to make a decision.  Don’t leave it there.  Follow up with this question: “I am very interested in this position.  What else can I tell you that would help you make your decision?”  If the interviewer tells you that she is not considering you as a candidate, ask: “Thank you for considering me.  Do you have any advice for me as I continue my job search?”

In either of these cases, the interviewer could give you an answer that isn’t helpful.  On the other hand, if you don’t ask the question, they won’t be helpful because you’re not asking for it.  Use the phone.  Ask questions.

Facing a Wall

I talked with a client for nearly an hour today.  She’s spent the last twenty years working in advertising.  However, she no longer wants to work in that industry, which now makes her feel disgusted (her word).  It’s time to move.  The problem: She doesn’t know where she wants to go.

We discussed her current emotions.  Again and again, she said that she felt stuck as if she were facing a wall that blocked her path.  I asked this question: What do we do about the wall?  In a case like this, my philosophy is to make the metaphor real.  What can one do about a wall?  There seems to be these options: go over it, go under it, go around it, punch a hole in it, or knock it down.

Rather than jump right into work related matters, the client and I discussed her hesitation and fears.  We also talked about what was most important to her: helping people.  My advice was to use this goal to get passed the wall.  I suggested finding a volunteer opportunity.  Of course, volunteering isn’t the same thing as getting a job.  It does help deal with the wall problem.  Once my client is active, she’ll regain self-worth and confidence.  She might find that helping people is very important and pursue a new line of work.  Or she might find that her old line of work doesn’t look too bad.

Almost every person faces such a wall at some point in his or her career.  We’re all open to fear and despair.  The real problem isn’t that emotion so much as the paralysis it can generate.  My solution is to find a way to be active and positive.  Volunteer.  Take a part time job.  Find a counselor who can offer specific strategies to move forward.  Don’t stand in front of the wall.  There a job and better life behind it waiting for you.

Getting Too Personal

A friend of mine is in HR, and he told me two interesting stories about how candidates talked themselves out of a job by focusing too much on personal issues.

In one case, a candidate whose primary function was not client facing said that he did not really care to interact with the company’s type of client.  In one sense, it shouldn’t matter since he’d seldom meet a client.  Still, a VP told my client that he wants an organization that is totally client focused.  By talking too much about his personal preferences, this candidate talked himself out of a job.

In the other case, a candidate rambled on for 10 minutes about his daughter’s professional accomplishments.  Both my client and his boss tried to redirect the candidate to his qualifications for the job, but he was determined to finish his story about his daughter.  In doing so, he showed terrible communications skills and a lack of respect.  It’s great that this candidate loves his daughter, but his demonstration of love was not appropriate for a job interview.

Bottom line: Keep business about business.  Revealing personal information in a job interview can often boomerang and hurt a candidate’s chance of landing a job.  Keep focused on what the company needs and how you can contribute to its success.

Find Work You Love

Several pages in today’s Chicago Sun-Times were devoted to honoring Roger Ebert, who died yesterday at age 70.  One especially touching editorial talked about how Ebert was lucky to do work that he loved.  In part, it was luck.  However, it was also a matter of skill and good career management.

Too many people float from job to job without asking the important question: What do I want to do?  When I coach clients who are thinking about changing careers, I ask them to think about those skills that they most enjoy using on the job.  These skills are best thought of as “gifts.”  The better we can align where we work with our gifts, the more likely we are to be happy on the job.

After you define your gifts, the next step is to identify positions that require those special skills.  Then start to identify companies that are potential employers and begin to search job boards.  The job search is never easy, especially for people trying to change careers.  If your goal is to be happy at work, make the effort.  Employers do not care if you are happy as long as you do your job.  You have to be responsible for your own happiness at work.  If you’re not happy, start looking – now.

Sabbath, February 10, 2013

[On Sundays, this blog explores topics beyond its normal focus in “Sabbath,” a feature inspired by the similarly titled poems and collections of Wendell Berry.]

Quitting

I’ve grown fond of a new poet, Simon Armitage.  His poetry is accessible without ever feeling dumbed down or cliched.  In The Shout: Selected Poems, Armitage has several poems about a urban everyman named Robinson, whose life is tragic in the sense that he is constantly bored, a hamster on a wheel.

The poem Robinson’s Resignation captures this feeling and what can be done about it.  It is a simple poem, three stanzas and a telling final line.  In the first stanza, Robinson grumbles that he is “done with this thing called work, the paper clips and staples of it all.”  He is sick of complaining customers and their “foul-mouthed” children.  In the second stanza, poor Robinson spews hate for something almost everyone loathes – meaningless, endless meetings.  In the final stanza, he explodes the myth about the “friendship thing”: “I couldn’t give/a weeping fig for those so-called brothers/who are all voltage, not current.” Robinson walks away with a last line that is pure dismissal: “This is my final word.  Nothing will follow.”

Some people like to read into poems like this.  They would say the final line implies an ultimate ending, possible a suicide note.  My take is simpler. Robinson’s lament reflects a frustration I frequently see with my clients.  People are pushed to the brink at their jobs, so they walk way. Nothing will follow with the job they are leaving, but they quit in the hope of finding something better:  better pay, less boredom, a boss who is not a sadist.  If Robinson were a real person and needed money, what would follow this poem is a job search.  We often make strong declarations like “nothing will follow” only to change our minds the next day, if not the next hour.

I love this poem because it shows despair and frustration turning it a type of power: self-determination.  One book I’ve often recommended to clients is Seth Godin’s The Dip, which explores how and when to quit things.  Godin challenges the claim that winners never quit.  He writes, “Winners quit all the time.”  They know how to quit the things at the right times and stick with what will help them to achieve their goals. Based on Armitage’s other poems about Robinson, I don’t think this poor man will ever be a winner, but his world is much like ours, so we can laugh at him and ourselves, hopefully learning in the process.  I strongly recommend – in particular order – The Dip, Seth Godin, Simon Armitage’s poetry, and quitting.  All are empowering.

Sabbath, July 15, 2012

[On Sunday, this blog explores different aspects of life and work in “Sabbath.”]

The Right Kind of Work

Even when English majors studied Victorian literature, few learned the name of William Morris (1834-1896), who was a poet, novelist, essayist, artist, and textile designer.  Morris believed that art and design go together.  He also believed that most people could bring some kind of art or creativity to their work.

Penguin Books has published a small paperback collection of Morris’ essays that is entitled Useful Work Versus Useless Toil.  The title essay addresses many concerns that still plague us in 2012.  Morris criticizes the rich as doing no work and producing nothing.  He says the middle class are little better because they aspire to be like the rich, people who “will not have to work at all.”  Most people fit in neither of these classes.  Their work is drudgery and supports those on the upper levels of society.

What should work be?  Morris linked it to the word hope: “hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure.”  Hope of Rest is what it seems, having time to live outside of work, especially in retirement.  Hope of Product is that we can make something of use, something “Nature compels us to work for.” Hope of Pleasure focuses on the kind of work that makes the person doing it feel engaged in body and mind.  Morris’ vision of what work brings is radical beyond anything imagined today: “Surely we ought, one and all of us, to be wealthy, to be well furnished with the good things which our victory over Nature has won for us.”

Morris imagined a time when machines would let people enjoy more leisure time. However, he doubted that the current system would let such a revolution take place, since “capital” drove wealth to the upper classes and asked for more work from the lower. Clearly, this critique would make sense to the Occupy protesters in America and their fellow protesters in Greece and Spain, who are asked to endure austerity for debts run up by their governments and the banks they serve.  Morris sums the problem up in these words: “For all our crowded towns and bewildering factories are simply the outcome of the profit system.”

For Morris, our society will change with our work: “To compel a man to day after day the same task, without any hope of escape or change, means nothing short of turning his life into a prison-torment.”  This sentence might initial make us think of factory works, the kind that Charlie Chaplin spoofed in Modern Times.  But many people we know, white collar workers, face a similar torment of meaningless work in sales, analysis, and service.  The workload is unending without any sense of producing a meaningful product.

Would Morris see our time as no better than his?  To some degree, I think he would.  Too many people work at jobs that give them no pleasure.  They work for money.  Most of the wealth they produce floats up and away from them.  However, there is a trend that I think Morris would cheer: the craft movement.  From small farms to craft brewers and coffee roasters to independent shopkeepers and restaurant owners, all are working with the kind of “hope” that Morris advocates.  Mass produced products still dominate the market, but it is possible to enjoy and support the work of a craft worker.  Too many people still buy Bud at Wal-Mart and eat breakfast (and sometimes lunch and dinner) at McDonalds.  Often, it is all they can afford, the outcome of a rigged system.  Even so, new options are growing by the day, which gives us hope that someday “useless toil” will give way to “useful work,” the kind of work that makes us happy.

Oscar Wilde on Work

Sometimes we need a little humor:

“Work is the curse of the drinking classes”  Oscar Wilde

Work as Opportunity

We often think of opportunity at work as the chance to get a promotion or make more money.  As usual, Seth Godin puts a different spin on conventional wisdom.  He sees work as a platform where we can make our art shine.  As he demonstrates in this post, anyone can be an artist if they use the platform the right way.