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Last night I was arranging my application information in much the same way you would in a CRM program. CRM, if you don’t already know, stand for “Customer Relationship Management” and has been a hot ticket in the last few years. Most good sales people were already keeping notes on their clients, but CRM formalized the process company wide and has profound implications for all sorts of decisions regarding the clients. I wasn’t looking for anything so lofty, just a way to keep track of who I had talked to and where we were in the process.

My setup was a simple spreadsheet, and as I began to fill it out I kept asking myself what kinds of information I should include: names and addresses, websites, contacts, etc. One of the things I realized was that for some of the interviews I have done I came away learning some valuable lessons, so I started a new column and detailed what I had learned from each. To my great surprise I found that I could point to a number of important lessons I had learned from each interview I had been on. Below is a partial list of those lessons:

• Research, research, research: I got a call from a company just minutes after applying for a job with their company and did a phone interview on the spot. This was a bit surprising, but the job was right up my alley and looked promising. Still, the fact that they had called so quickly raised questions. I went to a website called ‘glassdoor.com‘ where companies are rated by current and former employees. There I learned that the offer was legitimate but that I would be assuming a great deal of risk for the first year or so. I would have to pay most of my own expenses until I could generate enough in sales to make a living in a very competitive industry. Sorry, but no thank you. Been there, done that.
• Always dress for success: I had applied to a local auto parts place for a management position at their home office and hadn’t heard anything. I needed to get something for my car one Saturday morning so I decided I would ask a few questions while I was in their store…in my Saturday work clothes. You guessed it, an executive with the company was in the store also, heard my question and did an interview on the spot with me in shorts and grease stained Tshirt. I won’t make that mistake again.
• Count the cost: My wife and I are hoping to move closer to our grandchildren sometime in the near future. I got a call from an employer with a company in their area and I couldn’t get up there fast enough for the interview. I thought the interview had gone well but a week later I learned that the job had been given to someone who already works for their company. Of course, why wouldn’t they hire someone they already knew? But if that was the case then why did they ask me to come up? Did they just need to fill some sort of quota for the number of people they need to interview, or was a crafty manager looking at who may be moving into her market? Either way, I needed to better job of answering those questions before spending hard earned money on travel.
• Read the job description very carefully: I went to an interview with a large corporation looking for someone in management in an industry where I have a lot of experience. When I got there I learned that the position I had applied for was nothing more than a common laborer position for which I was grossly overqualified. When I got home I went back to the original job posting to see where I had gone wrong. The position was listed as ‘management training position’ and included such tasks as stocking shelves and loading material into trucks. My mistake, all I saw was the word ‘management’ and I should have looked at the details better. I have since learned that corporations spend a great deal of time writing job descriptions and if you are clever you can glean a great deal about what they are looking from from those descriptions.
• Nothing beats personal follow-up: I applied to several positions with a large firm in town and got no response. As it turned out, I was going to be going by one of their locations and I stopped in to ask a few questions. Within minutes I was whisked into an office and was answering questions about my qualifications. The simple truth is, we are in an employers market and it falls to us now to get ourselves hired. Sitting by the phone waiting for an interview just doesn’t work anymore.
• Winning isn’t normal:I didn’t learn this in an interview but as part of my research I recently read Jeff Sexton’s wonderful review of the book “Winning isn’t Normal.” Jeff does a great job of breaking down the books premise that “Win­ning is unusual.  And as such, it requires unusual action.” The book was written by Keith Bell, a swimming coach, and he is telling athletes that if they expect to win they are going to have to work harder and smarter than their competition. How appropriate is that to this job market where getting hired truly is a win and where the competition is tougher than ever?

Those are a few of the more profound observations I have made in the last few weeks and I am sure there will be more in the next few…unless I get a great offer. I’ll post more as I make them, but feel free to add your own observations below; no telling who you may help; perhaps even me!