Janice Worthington MA, CPRW, JCTC, CEIP Send Janice a Question

Mistakes That Assure You Don’t Get Hired!  Happy February! The employment view from here in the Midwest was great during the month of January. Really! Columbus companies opened their doors to new hi-tech hires (I kid you not!), Detroit hired Quality Directors, Cincinnati hired Manufacturing Managers, Louisville hired Operations Managers, Cleveland hired Pharmaceutical Sales Reps., Indianapolis hired Underwriting Managers and Dayton hired Engineers. There were sign-on incentives, company cars and attractive benefits packages offered and accepted. The good news is, that despite the continued layoffs and unpleasant rate of unemployment, there were job openings and companies that hired! If they didn’t hire you this could be why: You Went Into the Marketplace With an Attitude of Entitlement - Understandable but unacceptable. After all you qualified for the job! You qualified for the last six jobs but nothing happened for you! Not one job offer and for many of you not one interview! How could this possibly happen? Perhaps because you never got into the spirit of the competition and maybe you didn’t even realize that job search was a competition! Sure you had a lot to offer but so did the other 300 candidates that made it past the résumé scanner to the Human Resource Representative. Your Résumé Was No More Than a Cut & Paste of Your Job Descriptions - You didn’t realize that a performance-based approach would set you above the others and that your résumé might have included an enticing solution to the hiring employer’s needs. Or perhaps your résumé did not contain the necessary hard skills or soft skills, also known as keywords. Perhaps your paragraphs were too "heavy" for a reader to tackle or your bullet statements were so short that they revealed very little about your experience. Maybe the visual presentation was not professional or perhaps your vocabulary was far too sophisticated for your desired career-level. Get help! Your Search Strategy Was Far Too Passive - You found and responded to an opening with Ford in the Sunday newspaper classifieds, but you neglected to send your résumé to General Motors, Chrysler, Honda and all of the others. You went to a headhunter and then waited for him to find you a job. What you neglected to realize was that the headhunter’s priority was not you, but the company that paid him to find the perfect hire. You posted your résumé on the Internet and waited for hungry employers to find you. No one called. And finally you prejudged a potentially good opening as incompatible before ever giving yourself the opportunity to find out! You missed a great opportunity because your résumé slept in your computer. Your Interview Was Weak - Oh I know you have great communication skills! But you didn’t do your homework so you didn’t know enough about the company or the position for which you were interviewing. You thought that the best candidate was the one with the best answers and forgot to engage in a pro-active conversation. You gave great reasons for what you wanted in your next job but forgot to given the interviewer great reasons for selecting you! And worst of all, you mentioned money first and far too early! In 2003 you have to compete and then outperform others for a job offer. So get back into the game but know the rules! Look at the bright side! All of the points mentioned above can be accomplished immediately with rewritten résumés, revised search strategies re-energized interviews and rejuvenated attitudes. Eventually everyone gets hired! Make it happen in February.

Janice Worthington is President of Worthington Career Services, Ohio’s oldest resume preparation firm and one of the oldest in the U.S. With 14 years of corporate recruiting experience, Worthington Career Services opened its doors focused on applicant empowerment in 1973. She is known for advising some of America’s highest-ranking industry leaders. Please send Janice your questions at janice@worthingtonresumes.com .  For more information on Janice, please visit her website at http://www.worthingtonresumes.com/!