Tag Archives: job opportunities

An Authentic, Interviewing Voice

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Jobseekers face a difficult obstacle. The interviewing situation is pressure-packed and stress-filled, and feeling nervous before the interview starts is normal. After all, you want this job, but only one person is leaving this contest with  a job offer.

If feeling anxious and nervous before a job interview is normal, then we need a new normal, because our emotional state affects our communication in ways that can end the interview before we say a word. Here is how.

Our non-verbal behaviors (our facial expression, body, language and tone of voice) are subconscious expressions of our emotional state. If we feel nervous, then we will look nervous. We don’t have to think about it. Our expression follows automatically. When you are really happy you do not think about smiling, you just do. These non-verbal expressions communicate a great deal about who we are and weigh heavily in someone’s assessment of us.

We can consciously control our non-verbals for only a short period of time. For during the interview, our rational minds cannot stay focused on understanding the question being asked, formulating our answer, and monitoring and adjusting the subtle messages our facial expression, tone of voice and body language are communicating. Our conscious, rational mind’s processing speed is around 40 bits per second. It simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to control all of this. Then, absent conscious control, our non-verbals go back to expressing our emotional state.

THE INAUTHENTIC VOICE

Now what happens when we have confident answers (the verbal component of communication), but our non-verbals express an anxious lack of confidence? In emotional situations, when our words fail to match our non-verbal behaviors we tend to believe the non-verbals.

“Albert Mehrabian drew this conclusion from his research many years ago. In 1967 he wrote a paper entitled, ‘Decoding of Inconsistent Communications.’ His study found tone of voice and facial expressions were more influential than words when communicating one’s feelings or attitudes.

“Later, combining these results with another study, he produced the oft-quoted percentages, that weight the impact of the actual meaning of words as being only 7% of the message when communicating one’s feelings or attitudes, while tone and body language had a respective weighting of 38% and 55%.

“For our purposes, whether his ratios are accurate or not is unimportant. What is important is this: In high-risk, high-reward—emotional—situations, non-verbal behaviors are more influential than the words themselves, particularly when the two don’t match.” (from The Path to Job Search Success: Aligning Job Search With Human Nature, 2015, pp. 42-43)

When verbal and non-verbal communications don’t match we have an inauthentic voice. We are sending two conflicting messages, not a unified, consistent one. And what makes this so problematic is the way our minds have the ability to assess non-verbal behaviors in seconds.  If someone approaches with an angry face you are immediately wary. The rational mind was not needed to analyze this and sound alarm bells. That is because our other mental system, the cognitive unconscious, is much faster than the rational mind and it is continually assessing the world around it, including non-verbal behaviors.

So, what are we to do? We are to gain control of our emotional state, because that is what generates our non-verbal behaviors. How do we do that? By changing our brain chemistry. Here are two techniques that do that. Amy Cuddy’s power pose reduces the stress hormone, cortisol, which has an enormous impact on the brain (I recommend viewing her 2012 TED talk). And taking slow, deep breaths does the same thing. Practice the power pose in the hiring organization’s bathroom about ten minutes before the interview, and take a few deep breaths while waiting for them to fetch you for your first interview. Then speak with an authentic voice. It is a voice that inspires confidence, trust, and the belief that you are more than able to handle the job.

 

 

 

Radio Interview: Informational Interviewing with Marty Gahbauer

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If you want to learn about informational interviewing, then it helps to do so from someone who conducted over 100 of them and learned the nuances of this process. That person is Marty Gahbauer and my radio interview with him was a fun opportunity to go over many of the most important insights he shares during a much longer seminar.

The following link will take you to a site where you can download a free podcast and then listen to it when the time is right. That could be during your commute, at the gym, during a shopping trip, whenever. http://bit.ly/1gCrBlx

I hope you enjoy it and please share it with other jobseekers who could benefit from this approach. In a shameless plug, my book, No Medal for Second Place: How to Finish First in Job Interviews, has a chapter covering the subject.

My best,

Tom Payne

 

The Young and the Unemployed

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This is not the title of a soap opera, it is where the U.S. finds itself and it is a dangerous place.

Almost 6 million young people, aged 16-24, are neither at work nor in school. That’s about 15% of this demographic. What makes this such an unsettling fact is the longer-term implication of a generation waiting for work and failing to develop those skills required for advancement. This isn’t about individuals being unable to climb a corporate ladder; it is about U.S. businesses one day needing talented people to compete globally and finding this talent in short supply, because it never had the opportunity to develop.

The U.S. Capitol Building
The U.S. Capitol Building

Who is at fault? President Obama? The Republican-led House of Representatives? The Democratic-led Senate? With respect to your current state of unemployment, it doesn’t matter. Furthermore, if the unemployed focus on assigning blame, then the struggle to find work will almost certainly fail. Why? Because it requires an incredible amount of energy to secure meaningful work in this environment and wallowing in the comfort of excuses, and blaming others, is a luxury the unemployed cannot afford.

The first step that must be taken by the young and unemployed is to steer clear of blaming the economy, politicians, or anyone else. Young or old, the mindset must be, “I am responsible for my current situation. Therefore,” the responsible jobseeker asks, “What am I doing wrong, and what must I do right, to change this situation?” This may seem like strong medicine, but until we take full responsibility for our current situation we will be distracted by excuses from focusing on what is important.

If you are serious about finding work, then assess your current job search condition with this simple diagnostic:

  1. Do you understand the value your strengths offer?
  2. Do you even know what your strengths are? (If you don’t, that’s okay, because most people don’t.)
  3. Can you articulate them to a hiring authority in a compelling way?
  4. Are you networking effectively? Besides your LinkedIn page, are you pursuing informational interviews to network your way into the hidden job market?
  5. Have you developed stories to share your unique skills in a memorable way?
  6. CTC ChicagoAre you taking advantage of professional help? Coaching? It may be within your financial reach and it will accelerate the growth of your job search skills in ways you cannot imagine. For example, I serve as a volunteer coach at the Career Transitions Center of Chicago and their three month program costs $300. Check your location for similar programs. They may be offered by churches or synagogues, Chambers of Commerce, University alumni programs, but they will give you another perspective which is invaluable.

There is much more to do than answering these few questions, but it is a start. It is moving in the right direction. It is acting responsibly and facing the challenge of this tough job market with a positive, focused, no-excuses attitude that will be far more productive than one that allows the crippling luxury of excuses.

Accessing the Hidden Job Market

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This is the first of several posts on informational interviewing. The final post will have a link to a radio interview I did with a master of this networking technique: Marty Gahbauer.

How do you gain access to a club that is operating behind closed doors? You knock. Requesting an informational interview is like knocking on a door and seeking a day pass to an exclusive club, and depending on how well your interview goes, you might end up getting an offer to join this club.

interview-questionsCompanies frequently have opportunities that the rest of the world never sees. They are never posted and are filled by networking. Therefore, you’re only hope of being considered for these opportunities is through networking.

There are many ways to network beyond speaking with your personal contacts. LinkedIn is a networking tool. Recruiters can be used to network. But informational interviewing is unique in that it intentionally expands your networking into industries different from the ones you’ve worked in. And this is what makes it such a valuable tool.

The purpose of an informational interview is to learn about another field of work and see how well your skills, strengths and interests align with this field. It is also a way of exposing your brand to others in these industries to see if it is valued.

Something I strongly recommend is to choose more than one industry, but no more than three. By putting your eggs in more than one basket you will increase your odds of finding an opportunity. And by focusing on three industries instead of ten you will develop some buzz around your name within those industries. In other words, as you get to know more people in a particular industry, and they get to know you, you will increase the likelihood that your name will pop up in conversations and that you will be considered for open positions.

Next, we will speak about the importance of developing your brand and the powerful impact this can have during an informational interview.

You’re Hired! A Radio Show Supporting Jobseekers

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You’re Hired! is a radio show offering jobseekers powerful job search tools. The attached link will take you to an interview I conducted with Orla Castanien, a sought after speaker on the subject of strengths and how discovering them and articulating them is at the core of successful job search.

I first heard Orla speak at the Career Transitions Center of Chicago and was not just impressed with the logic and strength of her positions, but also with the utility of the exercises she used to help a person learn their strengths. One of these techniques, the peak moment exercise, is contained in this free, downloadable podcast. The link to this show follows:

http://bit.ly/1cNI9oc

I hope you find it enjoyable and I look forward to sharing some future interviews with the CTC’s volunteer coaches and staff, and others, on their areas of expertise.

Where Life Leads

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Job searches need to be active and positive. To sit around and wait for something to happen is no recipe for success. But as we navigate this maze it behooves us to listen, to watch, to receive impressions from our environment, because they may draw us toward that unimagined path of fulfillment and prosperity.

IMG_0074Life has a way of leading us in new directions. Sometimes the new path is suggested by something you keep bumping into, or from a casual conversation with a friend. Other times it springs from a sudden yearning within your heart. But whatever it is, or wherever this new direction comes from, quiet your busy-ness so that you can hear it.
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Our anxiousness during a job search can make the escape of mindless multi-tasking a form of self-medication. We are able to forget our fears when we are checking our favorite websites on our smart phones, or texting a friend, or posting on Facebook. The trouble is these “moments” extend into lost hours that are better spent elsewhere. Our real-world problems require real-world solutions, not virtual ones. And living in the real world may lead me down the unexplored path that solves the riddle of this maze called “job search.”

Career-DNA

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DNA StrandsWhen we are trying to find a job we have a problem. Therefore, we need to employ a problem-solving strategy that works. The problem is complex–would you not agree?–so we need to simplify it, or else we will be lost in this problem’s twists and tangles.

Simplifying a problem means this: What is important? In the case of job search two tasks prominently emerge:

  1. Find the best opportunity.
  2. Secure it.

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That’s it. Simplification enables us to focus on what matters so that we can achieve our goal, namely, the solution. But how do you find the best opportunity, and not just any opportunity? This process takes time because we must first unravel the mystery of our career-DNA. This refers to the way we are “coded” to perform.

For example, do you have an analytical bent and are you introverted? If so, then a job focused on personally interacting with customers for much of the day is probably not in the “best opportunity” category for you. Are you extraverted and have a strong preference to driving tasks to closure? Then a think tank that endlessly explores all of the possibilities of a subject, leaving things open-ended, is a first-class ticket to insanity, frustration and failure.

Once we know who we are, the sort of value we bring, then we are able to target companies and industries that offer jobs that match our career-DNA. And here is an extraordinary benefit of this approach. We do not have to fake our enthusiasm or passion for such an opportunity. It is real, palpable, and sensed by hiring authorities. We exude job-search pheromones that make us highly attractive to companies that have openings.