Meet the One With the Purple Glitter Pen
A colleague describes her favorite applicant of all time. This candidate:
- Filled out the application in purple glitter pen
- Spelled her own name wrong twice
- Listed “pole dancing” as one of her special skills
- Listed her high school information on the education page, along with “Got kicked out in 10th grade for fighting”
- Drew a big X through Friday and Saturday on the “Availability” portion, with a note that said, “I don’t work weekends cuz I’m hung over”
- Wrote “Worth a million dollars someday” next to her signature on the back
My colleague though it was a joke, until the applicant came in a couple of days later to check on the status of her application. One of her fake nails popped off while she was drumming her fingers on the counter top and hit the assistant manager in the eye.
Tales of the Cluefree appear pretty much every Friday. Past stories are here.
9 Things to Do In Your First Week of Unemployment
Your first week of employment can be a real mess. You don’t know what to you with yourself, and you don’t yet realize that the patterns you start that first week tend to continue through your unemployment. That means it’s important to make good choices right from the start. Here are some things you should do right off the bat:
Video Interview Coaching: What Do You Think?
Stefanie from SnagAJob emailed me today (well, actually Tuesday, but I’m way behind on my email…as usual). Her team has put together a video job interview coaching thingy. It’s kind of like a choose your own adventure thing, where you hear the interview question and then choose an answer. Then you see how that answer plays from the interviewer’s perspective. She asked for my feedback, and I gave it to her via email…but I’m curious as to what you think. Is this helpful? Are the questions/answers on target? Are there other questions they should cover? What do you think?
Here’s An Easy One: Be Prepared
A few weeks ago, I was cleaning out out the closet in my office when I came across some of my supplies from a previous life. I used to be an HR consultant, and most of the work I did during that period wasn’t really consulting. Instead, I served as an interim or ad hoc HR director. I swooped in, acted like I worked there for real, and then left when they didn’t need me anymore.
One of the interesting things about that kind of work is that you never know where you’ll be sitting. In some cases, I had a posh office. In others, I was in a hallway, a lunchroom, or the cubicle where they kept the fax machine. I never knew whether I’d have even basic supplies. So I put together a little office kit, so that I had everything I’d need no matter what. I had a little portable hanging file folder box, and in the top there were compartments for paper clips, staples, sticky notes, etc. Then I had this accordion-style thing that folded out and hung on a wall or door. I used my label maker to turn the top slot into an IN box, and then had the others labeled with “waiting for reply,” “calls to make,” and so forth.
3 Things Your Resume Must Include
I almost hate to post resume writing advice. It’s boring, and it usually feels a little obvious, and I get emails that say, “That was really boring and obvious.” On the one hand, I see where those people are coming from…but on the other, I get questions about these things all the time, from people who don’t necessarily live and breathe job hunting like some of us. So make sure your resume has these three things:
How Do I Handle Relocation?
A reader writes:
I’m looking to relocate back to where my family lives. How do I get employers to even consider me when I’m not local? I’m considering using my relative’s address on my resume, but I’ve seen conflicting advice.
I’ve seen conflicting things on this too. My own experience is that I’m not crazy about it when I think a candidate is local, and I call and find that they’re actually across the country and will have to fly in for the interview. I’m not usually averse to doing that, but I like to know it up front. On the flip side, I know from experience that it’s crazy-hard to get a job when you’re not local; I moved from LA to Milwaukee, then Milwaukee to DC, and then DC back to Milwaukee, and it sucked each time. It’s even harder in this economy.
Meet the One Nobody F__ks With
Early in my career, I did a lot of college recruiting (i.e. traveling to campuses to recruit students who were about to graduate from college). One of the things that is especially important in college recruiting is making candidates comfortable. They often don’t have a lot of interview experience, so they’re usually nervous. It’s important build a rapport and to get them to relax a bit, so that the experience isn’t so painful. That way you get a clearer picture of whether they’re good candidates for your company.
I was recruiting for a large company, and they had a very defined recruiting process, which included a list of behavior-based questions I was supposed to ask each candidate. She had been doing great so far, and the interview was going well. Apparently I’d been a little too successful in making her comfortable and building rapport, thought, because when I asked the last question (”Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a co-worker”) she laughed and said:
“Oh, people know not to f__k with me.”
And then she froze.
And you could see the realization slowly cross her face. It was painful to watch.
She actually ended up getting hired, because I decided to leave this out of my interview notes. This was a 21-year-old who had very little experience in job interviews. She had been extremely nervous at the start, and she grew more and more comfortable as the interview progressed. We had been laughing and the tone was chatty throughout, and I think she just lost her focus for a second. It happens.
She turned out to be an excellent employee.
Not every interview misstep is fatal. It’s okay to be human. If you can avoid dropping f-bombs in interviews, that’s good, but if you’ve said something dumb in an interview, stop obsessing. Nobody’s perfect.
Tales of the Cluefree appear pretty much every Friday. Past stories are here.
Photo by platinumblondelife
8 Questions to Ask in a Job Interview
Do you have any questions for me?
Most interviewers will ask this at the end of each interview. The correct answer is always, “Yes.” There’s nothing more pathetic than a candidate who doesn’t have a single question about the job.
Sometimes people ask me what they should ask the interview. I’ve already talked about some things you shouldn’t ask. These are the questions I always ask when I’m being interviewed for a job:
- Why is the position open? How long has it been open? Getting some insight into what happened before this is key. If they’ve gone through seven people in the past two years in this role, you need to know that going in. If it’s been open for six months, that might tell you something about their ability to make decisions, about whether they really need someone in this job if they’ve been functioning that long, and about how big the mess will be when you start working. I always want to know why there aren’t internal candidates for the position as well, because sometimes there ARE internal candidates, and if you get the job over them, dealing with them is going to be a challenge. Other times, there are no internal candidates because they have a lousy team, or because they have some great people but are too dumb to know it, or because their expectations are completely unrealistic, or because the boss is a weenie and everyone internal already knows that. Listen for clues.
- What would you want me to achieve in the first 3/6/12 months? I always like to get a sense of what their priorities are. Sometimes I agree with the direction they’ve chosen, and sometimes I don’t…but I need to know that going in as well.
- What kind of people are really successful here? What kind of people fail? There are lots of ways to get some insight into the culture of a company. This is one of them. Once I asked this question and heard, “People who don’t respect traditional ways of doing things and always want to try new stuff usually don’t do well here. Also, people who just blurt things out instead of being circumspect and working through back channels usually crash and burn fast.” Frequent readers of this blog can probably guess how well I would have done in that company.
- What’s your pet peeve in an employee? This is a great question to ask your potential boss. You may save each other a lot of grief.
- Why do you like working here? I ask this of every single person who interviews me, and I look for themes in the answers. I’ve interviewed with companies where a surprising number of people had trouble answering, which is a huge red flag. I’ve seen others where people at different levels or in different departments had very different answers. This is all helpful in determining whether the job is a fit.
- How do you like to communicate with people? How do you let them know how they’re doing? This is another question for your potential boss. I’ve found it very helpful for making sure I have a good fit—something that’s very important to me, because I’ve learned that while I can put up with all kinds of company dysfunction, I can’t work well for a boss I don’t like. I need to make sure up front that we’re going to have compatible communication styles. I also need to make sure I never work for someone who lets me know how I’m doing via formal performance reviews, because that drives me crazy. If you can’t come in and tell me immediately when I rock or suck or something, I can’t work for you.
- What are the next steps? This question serves two purposes. First, it tells you what is supposed to happen next, so that when you go home and obsess, you know what to obsess about. Second, it gives you some insight to how they make decisions in this company. If they need to you to interview with 15 more people, and eight of those people belong to the parent company rather than the subsidiary you’re actually interviewing for (true story), that’s a clue.
- What’s your time frame? Never leave without asking this. That way you know when to follow up (but you should add one week to whatever they say, because they’re never on time).
What questions do you like to ask in job interviews?
Photo by Stefan Baudy
As always, thanks to Anna at ABDPBT, who started the Fighting Listlessness on Mondays trend in blogging. Anna’s blog isn’t about job hunting; it’s about other, way more interesting things. I highly recommend it.
5 Ways To Handle Inappropriate Job Interview Questions
Every so often you get an interview that goes horribly wrong. They start asking you questions that are inappropriate, or offensive, or are so stupid that you have trouble not making a face. There are a few ways you can go in this situation:
- Answer the question. In a lot of cases, the interviewer doesn’t mean anything nefarious. I had an interviewer start off the interview with, “So, do you have kids?” I said I did, and we spent the entire interview time talking about our kids. He wasn’t trying to discriminate or pry…he just didn’t know how to conduct an interview. Since he was to be a peer of mine in this job, that wasn’t a big deal for me (in fact, that’s why they needed an HR person). Depending on the question and the person asking, sometimes just going with the flow is okay.
- Answer the REAL question. Sometimes people are trying to find out something legitimate, and they just don’t know how to ask. If someone says, “Are you a U.S. citizen?” they might really just want to know if you’re authorized to work here. You can answer with “I’m authorized to work in the U.S.”
- Ask them a question. Sometimes saying “Why do you ask?” (in a curious tone, not a defensive one) is a good strategy. You can figure out whether they’re jerks or not, and you can also find out what their issues are. Once, someone asked me, “Are you planning to have children soon?” I asked why they wanted to know, and I spent the next ten minutes hearing about all of the women they’d hired who had gotten pregnant and failed to return after the baby was born. It seemed statistically unlikely to me that THAT many woman could even afford to stay home after the baby, so I asked around. It turned out that this was the sort of place that you wouldn’t want to go back to on Monday, let a long after a baby. Most of them had gotten jobs elsewhere and just hadn’t told them. That’s good information to have about a potential employer. I saved myself a lot of grief.
- Flip it around. This works best for HR people, but I think you could do this if you were interviewing for any sort of management job. I’ve had one or two interviews where I’ve been asked something so covered with red flags that I said, “Oh, I see. You’re testing my knowledge of employment law. Don’t worry, I would NEVER ask a candidate a question about their [religion, sexual orientation, whatever]. Then look at them. Blink if you must, but say nothing else. If they claim it’s a legitimate question, act shocked. You’re very unlikely to get the job if you use this technique, but if it’s so bad that you’re itching to shut it down so you can leave, this will usually do the trick.
- Leave. I’ve only done this once. Long before I was in HR, I interviewed for an administrative job with a religious organization. It had been a blind ad, and when they called me, I made it clear that I was not of the same faith. They still wanted me to come in, and I needed a job, so I went. The manager who interviewed me was great, but the next one was the office manager, and she was so hostile and nasty regarding my religious beliefs that I finally said, “I think I’d better go.” I picked up my coat and left. There’s no way I could have worked there, and there’s no need to listen to someone who is being deliberately offensive. Be polite, but remove yourself from situations like that. Life is too short to listen to the you’re-going-to-hell lady.
Photo by jbcurio
As always, thanks to Anna at ABDPBT, who started the Fighting Listlessness on Mondays trend in blogging. Anna’s blog isn’t about job hunting; it’s about other, way more interesting things. I highly recommend it.
7 Things You Need to Know About References
- Employment verification and reference checking are two different things. Employment verification means contacting your former employers and verifying your title, salary, and dates of employment. Checking references means calling people and asking whether you were a good employee. Nearly every company I’ve worked for conducted employment verifications, but only a third or so checked references. Some people feel that it’s a waste of time to call the people you list on your application, because of course they’re going to say nice things about you. Duh. That’s why you listed them. Occasionally you get one who goes rogue, but not often.
- Calls don’t mean you’re getting the job. Lately I’m hearing about more and more instances where companies are checking references for two or more finalists, instead of just the one they intend to hire. I think this stems from the idea that there are so many good candidates out there that employers can now be extremely choosy, and can take their time in making a hire. I had a company recently call me about someone who worked for me in my last job. The call was about 25 minutes long, and they apparently called her other three references as well…so they invested about two hours. In the end, they picked their other finalist (which is their loss, because this employee was one of the best I’ve ever had, and they are idiots for not hiring her, because she is a star). Be excited when you hear that they’re calling your references…but not too excited.
- They can call anyone they want, whenever they want. I chuckle when I hear candidates saying something like, “They called so-and-so and asked about me. Isn’t that illegal?” Of course not. It’s not illegal to ask someone about you. Nobody needs permission to say, “Hey, you worked with Joe, right? What’d you think of him?” That release you sign on the back the application is designed to protect the reference-giver, not the reference-checker. It’s mostly used for the employment verification, not the references (because most companies aren’t going to give out your dates of employment/title/salary without written permission from you). Since the references you give them are almost always people you’ve lined up to say nice things about you, any smart hiring person is going to want to use her own contacts to find out more about you. The higher up the position is, the more likely they’re going to ask around. If you haven’t sucked or treated people poorly, you probably have nothing to worry about.
- They can ask anything they want. Companies and individuals can decide what they want to answer…but the hiring company can ask anything. It’s illegal to use the answer if the answer indicates your membership in a protected class (religion, national origin, etc.), but it’s not illegal to ask. The person giving the answers can also say anything, as long as it’s true. If you got fired, they can say so. If you were late 32 times in six months, you can say so. If you quit by telling the supervisor to f-off and throwing your ID badge at him (true story), they can say so. Negative references are not illegal, as long as the information is true.
- Bad references are not as common as you think. I occasionally hear from people who think the reason they haven’t gotten a job is because their former boss is badmouthing them. It’s possible that this happens, but I have never, ever seen a case where a former supervisor has preemptively called around and said that an employee was bad. Never. I’ve had bad references occasionally, but they’ve never been unsolicited. The bad references are not super common either, because nobody wants to get sued, and even if what they’re saying about an employee is true, to have to prove it in court is an expensive, time-consuming venture. Bad references happen, but they’re not nearly as common as people think. It’s far more likely that you didn’t get the job because there was another candidate they thought was a better fit.
- You need to make sure your peeps are reachable. It’s up to you to know how best to reach your references. That means you need to check in with them BEFORE you hit the reference stage, and ask them how best to reach them during the next couple of weeks (cell phone? work phone? email? any vacations coming up?). You should also let them know the name of the company and what the job entails, so that they recognize the call when it comes. I don’t typically answer my home phone if I don’t recognize the number, but I will dive over my kids to pick it up if the caller ID shows that it’s a company that has recently interviewed someone for whom I’m providing a reference.
- The web is a reference. I’m pretty sure everyone who reads this blog is smart enough to know this already, but just in case: employers will Google you. If they can look at your Facebook page, they will. They’ll read your tweets. Whether employers SHOULD do this or not is a separate issue, but trust me, they do. If you’ve said stupid things, stop saying them, and delete them where you can. Use the privacy settings (especially on Facebook). Make sure the username for your favorite amateur porn site isn’t the same as the username for your email (another true story). The web is a bad place to say and do things you don’t want potential employers to know. You don’t need to hide who you are, but you do need to exercise some common sense.
DISCLAIMER: This is not legal advice. I am not a lawyer. You should only take legal advice from real lawyers whose real lawyerhood you have verified with the Bar Association in your state. Don’t take legal advice from from some blog you found on the internet. Duh.
Photo by Serge Melki
Thanks to Anna at ABDPBT, who started the Fighting Listlessness on Mondays trend in blogging. Anna’s blog isn’t about job hunting—it’s about other, way more interesting things. I highly recommend it.
Meet the Druggies
When I asked some of my HR/recruiting colleagues for their own cluefree tales, a lot of their responses involved drug testing. Here are a few:
- One candidate showed up for an interview looking completely strung out. He could barely walk. The interviewer asked just enough questions to be polite, and then asked the candidate if he had any questions. The candidate said, “Yes, uhhh, do you guys do drug testing?” The recruiter lied and said they did, hoping to discourage him. The candidate said, “Well, I could probably pass if we could put this off for a few weeks. Would that be okay?”
- Another candidate was hired, and they sent him for the drug test the day he started. The results came back with an adulterated sample. The candidate insisted this was a mistake, and asked to speak to the Medical Review Officer (MRO—the third-party medical expert who oversees this stuff). The manager, the HR person, and the candidate got the MRO on the phone. The MRO said that if the sample had indeed come from the candidate, he’d better get to the hospital immediately, because his urine had the same acidity as battery acid. The HR person and the manager looked at each other, then ended the call. The candidate quietly said he’d grab his stuff and go. On his way out, he asked if they’d be willing to give him a good reference, for one day of work, when he failed the drug test and made them call the MRO to boot. They declined.
- The next candidate had actually been with the company for about four months as a temp, and kept asking when he wag going to do his drug test so he could be hired as a regular employee. Finally his day came, and when he reported to work he was sent off to do his drug test. He gave his sample, and then disappeared. They never saw him again. Turns out he had the trifecta—marijuana (which stays in your system for weeks), cocaine (which stays in your system for a day or two), and heroin (which stays in your system for a few hours). This meant that the guy had actually done heroin before coming to work that day, even though he knew he was going to be tested any day so that they could hire him. You have to wonder why he bothered to go and give the sample at all.
I also had a candidate once whose urine sample came back as non-human. This was before the internet, so you couldn’t just buy it online like you can now. You had to collect your animal urine the old-fashioned way.
Clue: Just say no. You’re not going to beat the drug test. Really.
Tales of the Cluefree appear pretty much every Friday. Past stories are here.
Photo by marxchivist
Red Owl, Family History, and Company Relationships
My older kid wants me to dress up for Halloween.
Specifically, she wants me to wear what she calls the “owl shirt.” It’s a red grocery clerk’s smock with the logo of the Red Owl Food Stores on one side, and a Red Owl name tag on the other. I wear it when we play grocery store.
Red Owl was a grocery store chain in the upper Midwest. My grandma worked in the advertising department at their corporate headquarters in Hopkins, Minnesota for nearly 30 years. When I was little, we got to visit her at work a couple of times, which my five-year-old self thought was the coolest thing ever. That big red owl’s face was intimately associated with my grandma in my mind, and although they’ve been out of business for nearly 30 years now, you can still find their stuff in antique stores and on eBay (and there’s a lock of hair from my first haircut in my baby book…in a Red Owl envelope). You don’t even want to know what I’ve spent on various Red Owl items…signs, clocks, key chains, spice tins, rubber stamps, and more. I even have Red Owl metal inventory control tags on the file cabinets in my office. They’re really cool.
We also have a bunch of stuff from my husband’s great-grandfather’s lumberyard in Glenbeulah, Wisconsin. I have an apron, a fly swatter, and a pair of tongs with “W.D. Scott Company” etched in the side. The lumberyard is long gone, but we’ve still got a lot of stuff to show our kids when we tell them about their great-great-grandpa and his history in their daddy’s hometown.
Interestingly, although I’ve worked for a large number of companies and received lots of logo gear over the years, I’m not particularly attached to any of it. I still have the desktop aircraft models from my airline job, but that’s it. I’m way more into the stuff from companies that figure into my family history than my own (partly because I’m really into family history, I’m sure).
So I’m curious. Do you keep the logowear from the jobs you’ve had? From companies your family has had a relationship with? Do any particular signs or logos trigger an emotional reaction for you?
7 Dumb Things To Say In Interviews
Somebody found my blog the other day by Googling “dumb things to say in interviews.”
Now, I’m not sure why this person was looking for this sort of guidance, but I aim to please…so here you go.
- How much does this job pay? If this is the first question out of your mouth, it shouldn’t be. In general, you want to ask questions that are about how you would be successful in the position, not on what they can do for you. Save the what’s-in-it-for-me stuff for the offer stage. If you have reason to believe that the pay might be so low that you wouldn’t be interested in the job, there are better ways to handle this. Try asking a few more job-centric questions, and then saying something like, “This is awkward, but I want to ensure we’re on the same page before we move forward. My pay at XYZ Company was $X, and I’m looking to stay in that same range. Would I be able to do that in this position?” That way you’re not making it sound like pay is all you care about, and you’re acknowledging that asking at this early stage is a deviation from normal interview etiquette.
- Do you cover Viagra? I’ve had people ask this (and questions about other very specific medications, medical conditions, etc.). First, you’re telling people more than they need to know about your health, which is never a good idea (they’re not supposed to use it against you, but they often do). Second, the interviewer doesn’t necessarily know what’s covered. If this is a big concern for you, ask for a copy of the Summary Plan Document (SPD) at the offer stage, so that you can evaluate the insurance coverage against your existing coverage. That way you can look for yourself, and you don’t have to reveal things about yourself that just don’t need to be shared.
- Can you make the pay a little less so I am still eligible for [food stamps, subsidized insurance, take your pick]? There are people out there who actually ask their employers to fix things so that they can still get some sort of public assistance. These people suck. Don’t be one of them. The answer is always going to be no, because no one is going to stick their neck out to pull that kind of crap for you, and you’re waving a giant “DON’T HIRE ME—I CHEAT” sign at them when ask.
- Are you single? On behalf of interviewers everywhere, let me assure you that we don’t want to go out with you. If we do, we have your number.
- What does your company do? So, you don’t know how to Google then? Because there’s pretty much no excuse for not knowing a lot about the company before you come in. It’s 2009. We have the internet now. Look into it.
- I can start immediately. If you have a job, you need to give two weeks’ notice. When you tell me you don’t plan to give your current employer that courtesy, I’ll assume you’re going to do the same to me.
- No, I don’t have any questions. Really? You’re so uninterested in the job that you can’t think of a single thing to ask? Because I’m probably going to give this position to someone who is actually interested in knowing something about the job and/or the company. Just so you know.
Photo by aigarius
Thanks to Anna at ABDPBT, who started the Fighting Listlessness on Mondays trend in blogging. Anna’s blog isn’t about job hunting—it’s about other, way more interesting things. I highly recommend it.
Meet the Idiot Named Kerry
I was conducting a bunch of phone interviews. Like, 10-12 phone interviews per day, at 45 minutes each, back to back, for days on end. You should never do that, because it makes you stupid.
The way I do phone interviews is this:
- I lay out the interview questions on the left side of a Word table. On the right side, there are blanks for the answers.
- The candidate talks.
- I type in pretty much word-for-word what they say. I have a freakish ability to type as people talk and capture almost everything. It’s handy, because then the hiring manager can see for him/herself what the person said. I am very big on letting hiring managers be the decision makers, and they need enough information to make good decisions. Plus, sometimes I don’t know what the hell these people are talking about (especially for very technical positions). In those cases, it’s best that I document what they say and give it to someone who actually knows the job.
- At the very bottom of this Word document, there’s a place for me to type in my general thoughts about the person. At the top, I either put “recommended for interview” or “not recommended for interview.” I fill that in, and then email it to the hiring manager, along with the resume and cover letter. I’ve done this thousands of times. Thousands. It’s not that hard.
So I had completed this one interview. It was the 11th out of 12 I had scheduled for that day. The guy was good, so I put in, “Recommended for interview,” and I wrote something at the bottom like, “Strong experience and great communication skills. Would probably be a good fit for this client group.”
It’s a good thing I did, because instead of sending it to the hiring manager, I sent it to the candidate. The whole thing. With the interview notes and recommendations and everything.
I didn’t even realize I’d done it until he emailed me back, with a note that said something like, “Thanks—I liked you too. You’re recommended!”
I stared at that email as it slowly dawned on me that I was an idiot.
And then I sent it to the hiring manager, who hired him…because when you have someone who is qualified AND has a sense of humor, you grab ‘em.
Tales of the Cluefree appear pretty much every Friday. Past stories are here.
Photo by Lin Pernille Photography
7 Ways You Can Use Your Phone to Screw Yourself Out of a Job Opportunity
This post originally appeared on January 26, 2009.
- Music instead of ringing—Apparently, there’s this new thing where instead of hearing a ringing sound when you someone, you hear music, chosen by the owner of the phone. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that-but consider whether your choice of music is really representing you well. A friend of mine just called a candidate to set up an interview for a management position, and was treated to a song that mentioned the singer’s intent to go to a club and “spread a little love and spread a couple cheeks.” She called back twice to make sure she heard it right…and then she hung up and called another candidate instead.
- Answering machine or voice mail greetings—Back when I started recruiting, most people didn’t have voice mail at home-just answering machines—and hardly anyone had a cell phone. As a result, I called people at home, and listened to long, long outgoing messages featuring their children singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and doing little skits and all sorts of cutsie stuff. I love kids, and mine are adorable too, but they don’t belong on the answering machine (at least, not while you’re job hunting). More recently, as more people have cell phones and home phones with personal voice mail, the mailboxes are usually for one person rather than the family…but that doesn’t stop the stupid stuff. The whole pretend-you-really-answered-the-phone-and-can’t-hear-the-caller routine is not that funny to begin with, and it’s even less funny when you have 20 candidates to call in a day. Knock it off. Change your outgoing greeting to something reasonably professional (and short!), at least for the duration of your job search.
- Kids, spouses, or roommates— I can think of two-count ‘em, TWO-people I’ve called in my entire career whose kids have done an exceptional job taking a message. I made sure to let the parents know when I spoke to them later. The rest, though…forget it. Teach them to let calls roll to voice mail or the machine unless they recognize the number on the caller ID. I’d much, much rather leave a message with a machine than try to get a 10-year-old to successfully find a pen and some paper, spell my name, my company name, and my complete phone number, and then remember to give you the message. Roommates can be even worse. I can’t count the number of roommates I’ve spoken to who have refused to take a message altogether, saying they were too busy or couldn’t find a pen or said “I’m not his secretary.” Even better are the ones who think you are the other woman or something, and ask you what the hell you want with their husband/boyfriend. Love those. Best of all are the ones who, upon hearing you’re with XYZ Company, think you’re selling something and hang up on you.
- Television— It blows my mind when people leave the TV blaring when they’re on the phone with an employer. I’ve had people try to do this through entire phone interviews, and guess what? That sound travels better than you think. I can’t understand a word you’re saying, because all I can hear is the Dr. Phil theme song. Hit the MUTE button before you even pick up the phone. It is never okay to have the TV on during a business call.
- Call Waiting—Honestly, unless you are waiting for a call that is truly life-or-death, don’t interrupt a call about a job. You’re telling the employer that you have better things do to than talk to them, and that’s usually not a good message to send. If you MUST take the other call, make sure you’ve really pressed the right button. I once had someone say, “Hang on, I’m talking to some bitch from XYZ company,” not realizing I was still on the line.
- Taking calls while driving (or at the checkout counter, or getting your hair done)—Seriously, I’d much rather leave a message than compete for your attention with the other people you’re dealing with. You’re being rude to them AND to me. That’s just not cool. Just let it roll to voice mail until you’re someplace where you’re not in traffic and not talking to someone else.
- Peeing—Wondering whether we can hear that through the phone? Yes. We can.
Photo by flattop341
Thanks to Anna at ABDPBT, who started the Fighting Listlessness on Mondays trend in blogging. Anna’s blog isn’t about job hunting—it’s about other, way more interesting things. I highly recommend it.
