Why You Can’t Accurately Predict a Candidate’s Future On-the-Job Success

“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

Sherlock Holmes, The Boscombe Valley Mystery, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

It’s nearly impossible to accurately predict a candidate’s future success on the job because of something called irreducible unpredictability. Any predictions would be based on incomplete historical/factual data supplied on the candidate résumé — some of which may not be totally reliable and honest — fail far short of providing reliable probabilities.

A 2008 study published in the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Journal found that the variance in executive success accounted for by technical competence and psychological factors was 20% and 10%, respectively. However 70% of the variance was attributed irreducible unpredictability.

In a separate study, researchers found that managers placed more emphasis on competencies assessed by unstructured interviews (subjective, intuitive) than on competencies measured by different assessments (objective, defined).

The process of candidate assessment and selection involves considerable interplay of many psychological factors; yet many believe that as long as the candidate is the “right person for the job” and has been accurately assessed, success is certain. This belief fails to recognize that many elements of performance are unknown at the time of hire. The idea that it’s still possible to predict employee success ignores the fact that there is no such thing as perfect prediction in the hiring process.

A résumé with quantified accomplishments and achievements can lead one to believe that past history is an indicator of future performance. Such a candidate résumé will likely get on the short list for an interview—if there weren’t any social media red flags that would call into question that candidate’s viability as a quality hire.

When you’ve exhausted all legal/ethical avenues for evaluating a potential candidate, you’re still left with irreducible unpredictability. When you’ve gone as far as you can, you go with what you know and then intuition or “gut instinct” often takes you over that gap to help with making the hiring decision.

Experience Breeds Overconfidence with Prediction Accuracy

But there’s a problem there as well. The mistaken belief by many decision makers, hiring managers, and HR people is that the prediction accuracy of future performance improves through experience. This results in an overweighted trust in intuition and growing overconfidence. Overconfident people place too much trust in their own ability, easily dismiss factors or influences that may undermine their own perceived accuracy, and they underestimate others. As we gain experience, one would think that it would have a dampening effect on overconfidence, but quite the opposite happens: it increases.

Overconfidence can lead to complacency by not engaging the due diligence of critical thinking. Instead, we opt for a path of least logical resistance, bypassing other possibilities and rushing to judgment.

Neural Processing Shortcuts Can Introduce Noise and Bias

Our brains rely on mental shortcuts (called “System 1 processing”) to simplify making critical and non-critical decisions from all the sensory input we encounter every day. There are many neural processing  short cuts, called “heuristics,” and each occurs in different contexts. The caution here is that because they are detours to longer duration neural processing (called “System 2 processing”), they can introduce errors and bias.

Unconscious bias refers to a prejudice of which we are unaware and which happens outside of our conscious control. (So-called “Overcoming Unconscious Bias” programs are really more about ensuring you can call up System 2 as a check on the effects of bias associated with System 1, though the efficacy of such programs remains questionable, according to many studies.) Unconscious bias occurs automatically and is triggered by our brain’s preference for neural processing shortcuts, resulting in quick judgments and assessments of people and situations (referred to as “thin slicing”). All of this is influenced by our background, cultural environment, and personal experiences.

But because System 2 takes more neural effort, it is easily distracted by competing demands. Stress, anxiety, fatigue, burnout all make it more difficult to access System 2.

Not all bias is unconscious. Not all bias is bias; it could be noise. As psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman writes in Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment:

Noise causes error, as does bias, but the two kinds of error are separate and independent. A company’s hiring decisions could be unbiased overall if some of its recruiters favor men and others favor women. However, its hiring decisions would be noisy, and the company would make many bad choices. 

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Donn LeVie Jr. has 30 years’ experience leading people and projects for such Fortune 100 companies as Phillips Petroleum, Motorola, Intel Corporation; government agencies (NOAA), and academia (Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Houston Downtown College). Donn specializes at the intersection of leadership, communication, and performance, which means he works with organization leaders and executives through the doorway of coaching and consulting so that they get higher performance, higher employee retention, and richer financial results though programs in intelligent leadership influence.

Contact him at donn@donnleviejrstrategies.com.

Taking Your Leadership to the Next Level: Conveying Your Brand Experience to Others

The biggest challenge people have when working toward professional advancement is understanding how to communicate the value their expertise and experience can bring to decision makers. Whether it’s a new job, a promotion, or signing on a new client or customer, the message must be about how your expertise and value solve their problems.

When someone asks you, “What do you do?” do you simply recite your job title? Do you parrot your job description? That’s how most people answer that question, but both responses fail to extend the conversation that was started. It’s possible that somewhere hidden in that conversation that didn’t happen, a golden opportunity could have presented itself for a job or signing on a new client or customer.

We’ve all heard the advice about creating an “elevator pitch” — that 30-second persuasive sales pitch you’ve mastered about your product or service. Trouble is, the elevator pitch doesn’t work very well in the 21^st century because it’s too self-serving and reeks of sales. Nobody likes to be pitched to anymore (unless you play baseball).

The elevator pitch has become marketing speak with such terms such as “value proposition” or “unique selling proposition” which only adds to the confusion.  Do you even really care about being able to express the value you bring to current and potential client, customers, or manager? (Your response should be “Yes!”)

Regardless of whether you are a first-line manager, a director, or any other role, we all should have a way that more clearly communicates the value of that experience we provide to others — and that value can be something as simple as a brief talking point. Talking points are far more effective when they are divided into two parts: First is a setup statement that is offered in response to the question, “What is it that you do?” or “What line of work are you in?” Your response to the setup statement must be designed as a “hook” to get the party to ask, “How do you do that?”

Here’s an example: I was at a conference networking event last year when I was approached by an individual who started some small talk. I could see by his name badge he was director-level executive. I asked him, “So, what are you looking to take away from this conference?” and his response gave me information I could use for possible followup. He asked me what I did and I replied, “I help executives just like you lead smarter, act faster, and get breakthrough results while being heard and getting noticed.” He then asked, “How do you do that?” which then opened the door for me to convey the value and brand experience my programs provide to executives.

Three important characteristics you need to be a presence-driven leader

Leadership is a hot topic today and training and development budgets worldwide will be increasing through 2022 to better develop leaders. According to C-Suite executives, the most sought-after skills for future leaders are soft skills, and of those soft skills, leadership presence tops the list.

Presence defies a one-size-fits-all definition, but someone with presence has been described as “a feeling that a person radiates when others observe how they gracefully, or seamlessly, interact with other people, other environments and different incidents and occasions.” Leadership presence embraces the elements of emotional intelligence, and more.

Engagement, positioning and influence are three important characteristics of presence-driven leaders that combine to create allies, advocates, clients, customers, fans and followers.

Working with setup statements and talking points will accelerate the ongoing development of your own platform of value and expertise. The hard work comes after where you’ve spent hours developing and fine-tuning your setup statements and talking points to paint a picture of the brand experience clients, customers, and others get interacting with your company, your product, or your service.

Understanding how to: (1) apply engagement, positioning, and influence strategies to strengthen your leadership presence and, (2) designing those “pre-suading” questions to ask decision makers that place you in a future scenario of being hired and working together with them is the pathway to leadership success.  

6 Reasons Why Public Sector Employees Need a Social Media Presence

Part of my involvement with the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) annual conference is providing personal career consultations with conference attendees. Many attendees work in the public sector, and over the course of individual conversations with folks who signed up for personal consultations, I was surprised to learn that many of them have no active involvement with social media platforms. Many believed they had to fully immerse themselves on a variety of platforms, but were relieved to know that that’s not the case at all. Some have Facebook pages, and some have LinkedIn profiles, but in most instances, either their LinkedIn profiles are incomplete, or they simply have a presence and are not actively participating – or both.

So briefly, here are six reasons why public sector employees need an active social media presence (primarily for LinkedIn) for growing their careers:

1. An active social media presence makes you more visible to decision makers and hiring managers. Social media has rendered organizational “gatekeepers” obsolete, because with an active social media presence on the right platforms, you can gain access to these people. Without an active social media presence, you are anonymous.
2. Some studies show that between 33 and 67 percent of all positions filled come about through referrals. That’s justification enough for you to continue building your network of contacts on LinkedIn.
3. Social media (more precisely, networking platforms) allows you to promote and leverage your expertise as a resource for others. Hiring managers are always looking for problem solvers, game changers, and solutions providers. And all hiring managers want experts on their team.
4. Social media connections allow you to build a level of mutual familiarity. One of the first steps to gaining access to decision makers is to first establish a degree of mutual familiarity. Make your connections strategic for any potential mutual exchange of value.
5. Familiarity with your network contacts over time leads to trust. When you consistently contribute value to conversations with others, “like” their comments, or “retweet” their Tweets, that familiarity can lead to mutual trust.
6. Mutual trust with your network contacts can lead to direct access. Hiring managers, like the rest of us, want to work with people we are familiar with and who we trust. More often than not, those people advance to the head of the line for direct access.

What accelerates direct access to decision makers is having a polished professional brand that makes its way onto social media platforms through your website, blog, articles published in peer-reviewed journals, books, conference presentations, and so on. All of that goes in your LinkedIn profile. I cover building a professional brand in both of my books.

As i mentioned, there’s no need to be active on a wide variety of social media platforms – only a couple where decision makers are active will be sufficient. Besides this blog and my website, I am active on LinkedIn and Twitter. My business Facebook page automatically receives feeds from my blog posts and Twitter activity. I limit 98% of my posts to issues surrounding job and career strategies.

In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her entourage are met at the doors to the Emerald City by a gatekeeper. They are only allowed entry after it’s pointed out to him that she’s wearing the ruby slippers, that were once on the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East. The gatekeeper knows that the Wizard would value the ruby slippers because they represented one thing:

ACCOMPLISHMENT!  What are your ruby slippers?

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My name is  Donn LeVie Jr. and I’m a former hiring manager for Fortune 500 companies (Phillips Petroleum, Motorola, Intel Corporation, and others) and have worked in the federal government (NOAA) and in academia as an adjunct faculty lecturer in the Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics for the University of Houston (Downtown Campus). I am the author of Strategic Career Engagement(September 2015), Runner-Up of the 2016 International Book Award for Business: Careers, and the book that reset the rules for successful job and career strategies:  Confessions of a Hiring Manager Rev. 2.0 (June 2012, Winner of the 2012 Global eBook Award and Winner of the 2012 International Book Award for Jobs/Careers).  I lead career strategy seminars at conferences, business/trade schools, colleges and universities, and U.S. military veterans organizations. I also offer a Career Engagement Evaluation subscription program to associations as a member benefit.

Does your conference need a keynote speaker or a career strategies seminar for conference attendees? My 2017 engagement calendar is starting to fill up…contact me directly at donnlevie@austin.rr.com for more information or use the Contact page on this blog.

Don’t miss out on my blog posts…follow me now on Twitter @donnlevie.

Word of Warning: Snake Oil Career Vitalizer Elixer (Part II)

In Part I, I addressed the dangers of relinquishing control of your career strategy to others with or without credentials (especially those earned online), and little to no experience vetting candidates they will actually hire. There are comedians, storytellers, and TV reality stars performing career coaching and résumé services that advocate making résumés more interesting or unique for hiring managers who are bored to tears reviewing typical résumés. Some of those folks have a few happy, satisfied clients.  “It’s about taking your brand to the next level,” some claim, by using narrative and other rhetorical devices. But they miss the boat when it comes to why hiring managers are uninterested and what’s needed to stimulate their interest.

Here’s the missing ingredient from their “taking it to the next level” approach: it’s how your brand, communicated largely through accomplishments and achievements, promotes the future benefits of your expertise that will interest hiring managers. Not narrative (do not use narrative formats as they are difficult for a hiring manager to scan for key words); not “interesting” entries.

I know of no hiring manager from my past experience who wanted to be entertained (on purpose anyway) screening résumés; it was an exercise in frustration most of the time searching for a clue as to a candidate’s potential for making the short list. Here’s how you make a résumé an interesting read:

• Populate it with accomplishments and achievements (quantified, where possible) and use bold typface to highlight them
• If you have a few articles published in peer-reviewed journals, place that list under the “Publications” heading (nothing says “expert” better than being published)
• Include a link to your blog that addresses important issues in your field or industry
• Include awards and honors you have received from recognized professional associations and employers (service awards and “employee of the month” awards don’t count)

Now THAT makes for an interesting read from the hiring manager’s perspective!

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Want to receive a free copy of my Career Strategy Tip Sheets? You get 5 bundled tip sheets (PDF) for career strategy, cover letters, résumés, job interview, and salary negotiation. Just let me know your thoughts on this or any blog post–or let me know of a career topic you’d like me to discuss from the hiring manager’s perspective.

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 Donn LeVie Jr. is a former hiring manager for Fortune 500 companies (Phillips Petroleum, Motorola, Intel Corporation, and others) and has worked in the federal government (NOAA) and in academia as an adjunct faculty lecturer in the Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics for the University of Houston (Downtown Campus). He is the author of Strategic Career Engagement(September 2015), Runner-Up of the 2016 International Book Award for Business: Careers, and the book that reset the rules for successful job and career strategies:  Confessions of a Hiring Manager Rev. 2.0 (June 2012, Winner of the 2012 Global eBook Award and Winner of the 2012 International Book Award for Jobs/Careers).  He leads career strategy seminars at conferences, business/trade schools, colleges and universities, and U.S. military veterans organizations. He also offers a Career Engagement Evaluation subscription program to associations as a member benefit.

Does your conference need a keynote speaker or a career strategies seminar for conference attendees? Donn’s 2017 engagement calendar is starting to fill up…contact Donn directly for more information or use the Contact page on this blog.

Don’t miss out on my blog posts…follow me now on Twitter

6 Secrets to Enjoying a Rewarding Career from a Hiring Manager’s Perspective

We all know the role talent, knowledge, and experience play in getting hired and succeeding in any professional career. But little is known about what drives us to pursue long-term goals. Is it perseverance? Passion? Persistence? The great American psychologist, William James, wrote in the early 1900s:

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental resources…men the world over possess amounts of resource, which only exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use.

Several studies by various university psychologists have shown that achievement is the product of talent and effort, which is a combination of intensity, direction, and duration of focus toward a goal. Follow-through is the purposeful, continuous commitment to a specific outcome; in fact, follow-through has been shown to be a very good predictor of significant accomplishment in science, art, sports, communications, and organization than other variables. After SAT scores, and high-school ranking, follow-through was the next best predictor of which students would graduate with honors.

In one study of 120 world-class pianists, neurologists, swimmers, chess players, mathematicians, and sculptors, each of the high achievers possessed three important characteristics

• A strong interest in a particular field
• A desire to reach a high level of attainment in that field
• A willingness to put in great amounts of time and effort

What I Have Observed in My 25-plus-Year Career in Hiring Manager Positions for Fortune 500 Companies

Over the years as a hiring manager, I have taken notice of certain individuals I had a hand in hiring or managing who went on to enjoy highly successful careers for themselves. These people more often than not showed personal and professional initiative, a willingness to learn, displayed a flexible attitude toward projects, had great people skills, demonstrated excellent communication abilities, and possessed an ability to navigate successfully through organizational structures (and the politics that go with them).

I have categorized these abilities into six major qualities that each of these individuals possessed:

• A sense of project ownership
• A sense of project urgency
• A sense of personal integrity
• A desire to help others succeed
• An attitude of being “self-employed”
• A sense of the graceful exit

A Sense of Project Ownership. A sense of project ownership is prized by hiring managers everywhere because it conveys that an individual brings to the table a quality mindset, a get-it-done-right-the-first-time approach to whatever project is being undertaken. An individual with this attitude shows concern for budgets, schedules, and meeting customer requirements—whether that customer is the job foreman, the CEO, or the consumer in the marketplace. It is a forward-moving focus that can not help but pull in others in its wake. People who display a sense of project ownership are not clock-watchers—they often “call it a day” at some logical stopping point in their task, not when the clock says 5pm or when the whistle blows (union rules not withstanding).

A Sense of Project Urgency. A sense of project urgency implies that an individual’s approach to project work is immediate, purposeful, and resolute. Such determined individuals are decisive about which solution to a problem to embrace after a careful evaluation of the problem, the potential causes, and an assessment of all possible resolutions, and how those fixes should be implemented. Such folks rarely keep others waiting or guessing as to how to proceed next.

A Sense of Personal Integrity. Personal integrity is a quality that, when tarnished, is hard to return to its original luster. And when it is lost altogether, is very difficult to recover. A person’s integrity is wrapped up in their truthfulness about all matters, their honesty in dealing with people and projects, and their reliability to honor their word. Personal integrity is not a badge people wear on the outside, but it is more a reflection of the deeper nature of their character and moral, ethical fiber.

A Desire to Help Others Succeed. Many years ago early in my career, I heard some great advice from author and motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar: “If you help enough people get what they want, you’ll eventually get what you want.” That philosophy works best when it is a conscious heart-felt decision to help others first and not seen from the flip-side perspective: “To get what I want, I need to help others get what they want first.” It is embracing a servant attitude that is so often lacking in the business world today. Imagine if Wall Street investment bankers, mortgage brokers, and auto company CEOs, and movers and shakers in Washington, D.C. had just made it their daily mantra: “how can I best serve your needs today?” we would not have high underemployment, lost retirements, exploding health care costs, and an economy struggling to find any sense of consistency.

An Attitude of Being Self-Employed. Truly successful individuals always understand that no matter where the paycheck comes from, they really do work for themselves. Besides the skills, knowledge, and experience they bring to any job, project, or task, it is also the sense of project ownership, sense of project urgency, personal integrity, and helping others succeed that makes them “self-employed.”  Contractors and consultants know what being self-employed is all about but sometimes people in hourly or salaried positions lose sight of the fact that they are self-employed as well. No one keeps anyone on the payroll out of the goodness of their hearts; it is the application of all those qualities mentioned in the previous paragraphs that keep the paychecks coming on a regular basis.

 A Sense of the Graceful Exit. In many industries (particularly the high-tech field), people often end up working together again at different companies, or end up managing former peers. Not only is it a smart career move to not burn bridges when you leave one company for another, it’s just plain courteous. Your reputation will continue to linger in the hallways and cubicle neighborhood for some time after you leave, so how would the odor of burning bridges enhance your character in the minds of those you worked with?

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(This post is excerpted from Confessions of a Hiring Manager Rev. 2.0 [Second Edition]. Refer to Chapter 16 for more details on these 6 important secrets to a rewarding career).

Want to receive a free copy of my Career Strategy Tip Sheets? You get 5 bundled tip sheets (PDF) for career strategy, cover letters, résumés, job interview, and salary negotiation. Just let me know your thoughts on this or any blog post–or let me know of a career topic you’d like me to discuss from the hiring manager’s perspective.

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My name is  Donn LeVie Jr. and I’m a former hiring manager for Fortune 500 companies (Phillips Petroleum, Motorola, Intel Corporation, and others) and have worked in the federal government (NOAA) and in academia as an adjunct faculty lecturer in the Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics for the University of Houston (Downtown Campus). I am the author of Strategic Career Engagement(September 2015), and the book that reset the rules for successful job and career strategies:  Confessions of a Hiring Manager Rev. 2.0 (June 2012, Winner of the 2012 Global eBook Award and Winner of the 2012 International Book Award for Jobs/Careers).  I lead career strategy seminars at conferences, business/trade schools, colleges and universities, and U.S. military veterans organizations.

Does your conference need a keynote speaker or a career strategies seminar for conference attendees? My 2016-2017 engagement calendar is starting to fill up…contact me directly at donnlevie@austin.rr.com for more information.

Don’t miss out on my blog posts…follow me now on Twitter @donnlevie and join in the jobs/career conversations at the Strategic Career Engagement LinkedIn discussion group. 

 

5 Signs You Suffer from Career Entropy™

Entropy. A long-forgotten term from our high-school physics days, no doubt. Let me refresh your memory: Entropy is a lack of order or predictability; a gradual decline into disorder in a system. Examples would include ice melting, your teenager’s bedroom, and our propensity for less physical activity as we grow older (for many of us anyway).

Your career and your professional brand can suffer from entropy as well (“Career Entropy” doesn’t seem to exist as a formal term, so I’ll claim it with a ™ ). Early in your working life you may have been actively involved with professional, social, religious, or community organizations. The excitement of working in a profession that you devoted at least 4 years of your student life to fuels your drive to achieve and excel. As your career matures, maybe you’ve let up on the gas pedal just a little; maybe you find yourself being distracted by things you would have ignored before.

Here are 5 signs that your career universe is slowing down to a crawl:

1. You aren’t involved with professional associations to the same level as you once were. You don’t read the journals anymore; your attendance at chapter meetings has been hit or miss; you don’t go to as many conferences as you used to, you thought about submitting an article for publication, but it’s too much trouble – maybe you let your membership lapse completely.
2.  You’ve exchanged your “consultant” attitude for an “employee” attitude. You’re starting to find yourself cutting corners on the quality of your work, unnecessarily pushing out schedules, or just skating by with a lower level of effort than before.
3. Your level of social media activity has decreased or changed direction. You are spending less time on networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn,  and cranking out fewer blog posts, and putting more effort into social sites. (True, there’s too much of that seeping into networking sites now).
4. You’ve been bypassed more than once for a promotion or raise. Before you start thinking “conspiracy,” look in the mirror and perform an honest assessment about your performance at work. The truth is out there.
5. You have an itch you can’t scratch. Maybe that restlessness, that full stall you find yourself going into is a signal that you need a change of job, company, or career. Truly evaluate your current situation and future prospects; they can’t pay you enough to be miserable. Time to move on.

To paraphrase an old saying, if you ain’t moving forward, you’re moving backwards. Or maybe it was no matter where you go, there you are…

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Want to receive a free copy of my Career Strategy Tip Sheets? You get 5 bundled tip sheets (PDF) for career strategy, cover letters, résumés, job interview, and salary negotiation. Just let me know your thoughts on this or any blog post–or let me know of a career topic you’d like me to discuss from the hiring manager’s perspective.

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Former Fortune 500 hiring manager Donn LeVie Jr. is the author of Strategic Career Engagement (September 2015), and the book that reset the rules for successful job and career strategies:  Confessions of a Hiring Manager Rev. 2.0 (June 2012, Winner of the 2012 Global eBook Award and Winner of the 2012 International Book Award for Jobs/Careers). He leads career strategy seminars at conferences, business/trade schools, colleges and universities, and U.S. military veterans organizations.

Does your conference need a keynote speaker or a career strategies seminar for conference attendees? Donn’s 2016-2017 engagement calendar is starting to fill up…contact him directly at donnlevie@austin.rr.com.

Don’t miss out on Donn’s blog posts…follow him now on Twitter @donnlevie and join in the jobs/career conversations at the Strategic Career Engagement LinkedIn discussion group.

Why Including a Photo with Your Résumé is a Bad Idea

I am confounded that many career advisors still raise the question about including photos with résumés; it should be a no-brainer for experienced professionals. With nearly three decades of experience evaluating a variety of scientific/engineering, marketing, and communications candidates, I’ve learned alot about human nature. We are visual creatures, and we cannot escape the influence visual appearance plays on first impressions. In fact, many times, positive visual impressions provide a false inner narrative to hiring managers/decision makers about a candidate’s potential for success before the résumé is reviewed. The candidate evaluation is then adjusted to fit the first-impression narrative.

In the above example, how can you NOT look at the photos and in some way or fashion lean toward one candidate vs. the other without even so much as a glance at their CVs? (Yes, CVs for academic, medical and some legal positions; résumés for nearly all others.) Even without photos attached, there is the temptation to run a Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google image search on a candidate’s name before reviewing the résumé. A good policy is to not perform any social media searches on job candidates until they have been interviewed in person to avoid first being swayed by visual appearance. Adhering to such a policy helps ensure you bring on board the most qualified candidates as a first priority, regardless of their appearance (unless you’re interviewing candidates for the next Victoria’s Secret catalog perhaps, where a certain look and body type are a priority).

I’ve written extensively about hiring manager presuppositions and “positive prejudice” in the hiring process (a few previous blog posts too), and it comes in many forms – from comparing the expertise of a candidate with the person who last had the position, to comparing a candidate’s expertise to a preconceived “ideal” candidate. Hiring managers have to be aware of the condition in order to avoid it.

Yes, physical appearance takes priority over qualifications in many European and South American countries. Those preferences are built in to the culture as a way of doing business. When the most qualified candidates take a back seat to the most attractive ones, the business bottom line (and shareholders) suffer.(I’ll take the U.S. economy over Brazil’s or Italy’s any day).

This is not to imply that attractive people can not also be the most qualified for a particular position; the point here is that physical appearance should not be the definitive criteria for candidate selection.

When considering advice from career professionals, not all career professionals are created equal; choose wisely.

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Want to receive a free copy of my Career Strategy Tip Sheets? You get 5 bundled tip sheets (PDF) for career strategy, cover letters, résumés, job interview, and salary negotiation. Just let me know your thoughts on this or any blog post–or let me know of a career topic you’d like me to discuss from the hiring manager’s perspective.

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Former Fortune 500 hiring manager Donn LeVie Jr. is the author of Strategic Career Engagement (September 2015), and the book that reset the rules for successful job and career strategies:  Confessions of a Hiring Manager Rev. 2.0 (June 2012, Winner of the 2012 Global eBook Award and Winner of the 2012 International Book Award for Jobs/Careers). He leads career strategy seminars at conferences, business/trade schools, colleges and universities, and U.S. military veterans organizations.

Does your conference need a keynote speaker or a career strategies seminar for conference attendees? Donn’s 2016-2017 engagement calendar is starting to fill up…contact him directly at donnlevie@austin.rr.com.

Don’t miss out on Donn’s blog posts…follow him now on Twitter @donnlevie and join in the jobs/career conversations at the Strategic Career Engagement LinkedIn discussion group.

Why Video Résumés are a BAD Idea

“First Impressions Video”, “Video Cover Letter”, and “Video Résumé” all sound like creative and unique ways to be remembered by hiring managers. Before you whip out your Sony handheld, have you ever heard of Aleksey Vayner? As a senior at Yale, he created a video résumé entitled, “Impossible is Nothing” for potential investment banker hiring managers, and he never dreamed of the results.

He included clips of his weightlifting expertise, some dance moves that would make Baryshnikov blush (the dance moves – or the outfits – or maybe both), and his own unique diatribe about the ingredients for attaining success in the working world. One of those hiring managers emailed the video to his friends, and from there it went to YouTube, where it instantly went viral.

The media and bloggers everywhere ran the story, thereby making Mr. Vayner’s humiliation total and complete. You might find some YouTube parodies of Mr. Vayner’s video, but the original has long since been removed. Wikipedia and Google have documented Mr. Vayner’s self-absorbed career strategy beyond the video résumé and it makes for an interesting read. A wild and crazy guy for sure.

Besides the video résumé being an ineffective medium for getting a hiring manager’s attention (do you think attractive people might receive a different level of consideration vs. less attractive candidates? Wouldn’t you want to be evaluated on your expertise instead?), Mr. Vayner mistakenly believed that a résumé was about him, and not how his skills, knowledge, and experience could be positioned as the hiring manager’s problem solver.

I think the grammatically incorrect title of the video résumé should have been a clue to its contents – or maybe a warning.

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Want to receive a free copy of my Career Strategy Tip Sheets? You get 5 bundled tip sheets (PDF) for career strategy, cover letters, résumés, job interview, and salary negotiation. Just let me know your thoughts on this or any blog post–or let me know of a career topic you’d like me to discuss from the hiring manager’s perspective.

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Former Fortune 500 hiring manager Donn LeVie Jr. is the author of Strategic Career Engagement (September 2015), and the book that reset the rules for successful job and career strategies:  Confessions of a Hiring Manager Rev. 2.0 (June 2012, Winner of the 2012 Global eBook Award and Winner of the 2012 International Book Award for Jobs/Careers). He leads career strategy seminars at conferences, business/trade schools, colleges and universities, and U.S. military veterans organizations.

Does your conference need a keynote speaker or a career strategies seminar for conference attendees? Donn’s 2016-2017 engagement calendar is starting to fill up…contact him directly at donnlevie@austin.rr.com.

Don’t miss out on Donn’s blog posts…follow him now on Twitter @donnlevie and join in the jobs/career conversations at the Strategic Career Engagement LinkedIn discussion group.

5 Ways to Up Your Interview Chops

Look, not all of us have that Tony Robbins charisma when it comes to speaking to crowds or even one-on-one in a job interview. But we all have the capacity to rise to the occasion when it’s in our best interest, especially when it’s to avoid negative consequences. I have a friend whose picture is in the Whos’s Who of Introverts, but can reason and persuade like William F. Buckley when it comes to talking himself out of a speeding ticket. He rose to the occasion to avoid  a very expensive ticket and taking a hit on his car insurance.

Interviews are no different. The negative side of doing poorly in a job interview is not continuing forward in the hiring process. That’s pretty strong incentive to put on your game face if you’ve made it as far as the job interview. It’s not about trying to be someone you’re not; it’s about stretching more out of your own comfort zone to embrace the opportunity. Just adding some slight vocal inflections and facial expressions adds enthusiasm to your statement “I have the necessary skills and background to help add value to the team” (or something like that). A genuine degree of enthusiasm helps convince the hiring manager you are interested in the position.

Here are 5 suggestions for upping your interview chops:

1. Embrace the fact that no one knows YOU and your expertise better than YOU. How can someone without the knowledge you have of your accomplishments, skills, and knowledge get the best of you? Only if you let them.
2. It’s OK if you’re a little nervous, but try to eliminate any fear of failure. The highly skilled concert pianist may be nervvous as he or she walks out on stage, but the audience is on the artist’s side – they want the event to be successful. It’s the same with hiring managers – they have thought highly enough of your background to invite you for an interview; it’s in their interest to want you to do well.
3. The best antidote to nervousness is knowing your résumé and accomplishments backwards and forwards. You can’t get tripped up by anyone regarding your work history if your résumé serves as your talking points; letting fear control your emotional response to an interview situation might, however.
4. Ask questions about the project work, challenges to be addressed, or specific tools to help you control any sense of being in the witness box. When there’s a two-way exchange of information, a conversation happens, which is a lot less threatening than an interview.
5. Have a sense when the interview is over. When I have interviewed quiet, introverted candidates, many just didn’t have any sense of timing when the interview was concluded. There’s that embarrassing pregnant pause and stillness in the room as if  the candidate is waiting for someone to call him or her out of the room.  I’ll often toss out the cue, “Do you have any other questions for me or about the position?” That’s usually a signal that we’re done if you don’t have any questions.

With solid preparation and going in to an interview to have a conversation about how you are the hiring manager’s problem solver, you’ll  eliminate the competition “from top to bottomus.”

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Want to receive a free copy of my Career Strategy Tip Sheets? You get 5 bundled tip sheets (PDF) for career strategy, cover letters, résumés, job interview, and salary negotiation. Just let me know your thoughts on this or any blog post–or let me know of a career topic you’d like me to discuss from the hiring manager’s perspective.

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Former Fortune 500 hiring manager Donn LeVie Jr. is the author of Strategic Career Engagement (September 2015), and the book that reset the rules for successful job and career strategies:  Confessions of a Hiring Manager Rev. 2.0 (June 2012, Winner of the 2012 Global eBook Award and Winner of the 2012 International Book Award for Jobs/Careers). He leads career strategy seminars at conferences, business/trade schools, colleges and universities, and U.S. military veterans organizations.

Does your conference need a keynote speaker or a career strategies seminar for conference attendees? Donn’s 2016-2017 engagement calendar is starting to fill up…contact him directly at donnlevie@austin.rr.com.

Don’t miss out on Donn’s blog posts…follow him now on Twitter @donnlevie and join in the jobs/career conversations at the Strategic Career Engagement LinkedIn discussion group.

Do You Suffer from “Twitterhea”?

You know how some pop music radio stations play your favorite song so much that you quickly get sick of it? When that happens, that song becomes the punch line of a joke. I remember when “Hang on, Sloopy” was such a big hit in the ’60s, and then the DJs ran it into the ground so much that the joke became, “Hey did you hear what happened to Sloopy? She let go…”

Well, I may be stirring the pot here, but the same thing can happen with too much of a social media presence. Many people suffer from it but are afraid to admit it. It’s a virus that affects the center of the brain that controls the compulsion for attention on social media like Facebook, but often shows up on Twitter. Nevertheless, some Twitter pundits recommend “3 to 5 Tweets a day” as a good healthy balance but it’s not the number of daily tweets that determines if you suffer from Twitterhea: it’s the number of daily Tweets that offer no content of value to others. That’s just a compulsion to be seen and heard.

Sure there’s a proper balance, but what determines that balance is the value of  your content. The value of YOUR content is what separates you from others who simply retweet the content of others all day long. But even if you tweet your own high-value content, there’s still something to be said for “less is more.”

Using 140 characters to get out a message is just about as long as people’s attention spans can stand before they start thinking about their next meal (or their next Tweet). If you’re trying to build brand equity, first ensure what you put on social media is weighted more with your own insight and knowledge than totally forwarding the words of others. Mix it up but leave it heavier with your own wisdom and expertise.

You know best what your goals are for social media. Remain aware that building your brand relies more on your thoughts and ideas rather than echoing those of others (though there can still be value there too).

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Want to receive a free copy of my Career Strategy Tip Sheets? You get 5 bundled tip sheets (PDF) for career strategy, cover letters, résumés, job interview, and salary negotiation. Just let me know your thoughts on this or any blog post–or let me know of a career topic you’d like me to discuss from the hiring manager’s perspective.

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Comment(required)

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Δ

Former Fortune 500 hiring manager Donn LeVie Jr. is the author of Strategic Career Engagement (September 2015), and the book that reset the rules for successful job and career strategies:  Confessions of a Hiring Manager Rev. 2.0 (June 2012, Winner of the 2012 Global eBook Award and Winner of the 2012 International Book Award for Jobs/Careers). He leads career strategy seminars at conferences, business/trade schools, colleges and universities, and U.S. military veterans organizations.

Does your conference need a keynote speaker or a career strategies seminar for conference attendees? Donn’s 2016-2017 engagement calendar is starting to fill up…contact him directly at donnlevie@austin.rr.com.

Don’t miss out on Donn’s blog posts…follow him now on Twitter @donnlevie and join in the jobs/career conversations at the Strategic Career Engagement LinkedIn discussion group.