© Mary-Frances Fox, Principal, Work Creatively International
Do you often find yourself locked out of the opportunities and pay you deserve? If progress toward the career results you desire is slow – you may be following all HR’s rules, but doing the exact opposite of how business actually thinks and moves forward.
Business thinks about growing business advantage, not about hiring. For all the transformational things your workplace may do for employee performance such as teambuilding or coaching or creative motivational methods – the process they say they use for hiring is old-school.
Unless your skill is currently quite rare, your career experience and credentials don’t assure you get an interview any more.
It’s not you. It’s that the hiring process is nearly broken, and this costs companies and you because it makes it very difficult to get your value across the table and have them commit to you and make a hire.
And that broken system is what’s slowing down your life dreams and goals.
How much more career progress would be possible if you knew that hiring rules matter less to companies than they let on? They’re too busy to notice and fix it, but you can address it meanwhile, and win.
Talk about what business thinks about
All organizations pursue the same 5 things:
- Money- saving it or making it
- Time – conserving it
- Relationships - adding or improving these
- Efficiency – doing things better
- Innovation - doing better things
Your resume, when interpreted by a jobsite, applicant screening software, HR clerks or any recruiter, cannot possibly prove you know what your next boss needs to achieve and can deliver it. These middlemen don’t know what that is. And if you’re at all ambitious, or your old job wasn’t right for you, you may not have the ideal experience to clearly show.
This makes you normal, but shut out
Submitting a document showing all your past history and hoping they’ll see you are the best choice is the slow-motion way to be allowed to talk to your next boss.
HR processes are not designed to get you to come in and interact. Quite the opposite. Screening is to reduce down the many who want in.
The hiring game is not designed as a winnable game for talent to play.
HR arose in the business world of 50 years ago, to take ‘people stuff’ off business’ hands – but now we know that everything about business is people stuff. A person, not a company, is who you’ll be working for. And that decision maker is never in the HR department unless HR happens to be your occupation.
HR is a channel you as jobseeker can use selectively, but my recommendation is migrate away from using it exclusively.
Today, you need a workaround.
I know a distinctive tactic that is not only accepted, you’ll be thanked for it if you start using it.
To me as a strategist behind thousands of successful career moves, the evidence is that the ground between companies and talent is still unclaimed and can be very effectively used by talent if they act how business acts. You can carry the ball down the field to a hiring decision by your new boss. HR isn’t even there.
Middlemen – career pages, recruiters and job boards -- are optional and may be reducing your access and value and delaying you by weeks or months by having you make document submissions that don’t lead you straight to a meeting, a clear mutual interest and fit, and an offer that reflects that high value you’ve established in the boss’ mind.
Here’s the shortcut if your career is slowing down….
Make yourself into a familiar person.
Hiring is by no means as objective and rational as we’d all like to think. It’s time-consuming and risky, so people delay it, look for shortcuts and seek intuitive comfort with any decisions made. Why a boss chooses a candidate is actually quite personal. The boss hires the person who is the most comfortable choice; the one they sense ‘gets it’ about what has to be accomplished.
When you broaden your toolkit to include techniques outside of HR’s process, and arrange to talk with people you should be working for – what is so great is that people will tell you what they need achieved, and value you for asking.
The thing that business respects and responds to, is persuasion. Persuasion is the business tool that gets the funds in the door to pay overheads and salaries and profit. HR doesn’t know this discipline that business lives or dies by, persuasion, and can’t tell you how to use it on your own behalf.
A definition of persuasion I recommend to you after 30 years of studying, leading, consulting on and teaching persuasion as a therapist, business owner and career strategist is:….
Helping people buy.
Persuasion occurs through structured conversation. It is fair, non-manipulative, and free of boasting or pushing. It happens collaboratively or not at all.
You need never sell yourself, and you shouldn’t try. You can instead help any boss hire you.
Your mandate as someone who wants a new, better job is to help the people you should be working for, to regard you as so relevant that you are their easiest choice to hire.
I recommend enlarging your repertoire of career tools to include asking better questions, so people tell you what they really want.
Not elevator speeches. Not CVs. If those were the leading edge of career success, every candidate would already be where they want to be. You’d pass HR’s filters, get into a room with the boss you want, and be handed an excellent salary offer.
Conversation is what achieves that miracle.
Your next boss is hard at work running a business unit in the same industry you’re in, or one you want to be in. You and he/she are two parties that have a lot to talk about.
Good conversations are not about telling, but asking. Posing questions about what this boss needs to deliver, not serving up a mountain of facts about how you were utilized at a prior company.
To be a job applicant electronically sending data to strangers you have no way to talk to, contravenes human nature and hiring ever since time began.
We are social. Even tribal. We all seek to deal with people we know, like and trust. When we lived in villages, that’s how we worked. We still do. And being the familiar person is within your control.
All that any executive, any of the best new bosses for you, will guard against is having their time taken up at no value to them. If you are not wasting their time, he or she won’t push you back to HR.
This is why you’ll want to start learning to be skillful at breaking the hiring rules and running better networking and interview conversations.
Everybody tells you to network, but how you network can wreck your value or elevate it.
But what I’d like is for you to take another look at what you say.
You can reach far and wide on Linked In, but what do you say and do after establishing a connection with someone there?
Don’t just bring old career thinking over to an online platform.
No more information interviews
Since the goal is to establish that you are someone who gets high pay for the work you do, your objective should not be to have this person ‘help’ you, but believe in and recommend you because of how much your workmanship would help them and others.
You don’t want to get information, you want to acquire relevance. Questions produce these inroads.
What if you could network differently to produce better results? And how could you do that without spending an undue amount of time as a volunteer to get known, starting as an underfill to get in, or having coffees that produce no good leads? How could you form and cultivate a network that gives you real traction, real results, without being pushy?
Questions grow your value.
When you get people talking, they deem YOU smart.
To get started asking better questions—take this one off your list:
‘Have you heard of any openings for a __________?’
It’s a question that can only be answered yes or no, and for long stretches of time it may be a ‘no’. This greatly delays your access to business needs you could fulfill, and gives you the profoundly incorrect impression that there are no jobs for you.
The reasons are, people are happy to say yes but in fact don’t very often hear of roles that would be right for you. And it’s been found that in up to 80 per cent of hires, companies have no need to reveal they are looking because they have their own preferred ways to find people.
Your industry needs your impact, the outcomes you know how to get for a company, every day.
So a far more productive question, because it always yields a name, never a ‘no’, is:
‘Who do you know who is involved with X aspect of the field?’
And then toss around any shoptalk topic you enjoy discussing, and add a twist to figure out what business context you should emphasize about your abilities, such as:
‘What sorts of outcomes would you think a unit doing that would want produced?’
Try those two foundational questions.
More advanced questions are then bolted onto the architecture laid down by these two.
Your questions show the business reasons they should hire, to them as well as you
Buy-in – the passion to refer you, the decision to hire you – isn’t triggered by your past record, no matter how strong. Ask productive questions about where another party is now and needs to go, and you’ll become their most relevant, and only safe option and easiest choice.
That’s how you get the top pay reserved for just one person— you make yourself the one they value most.
Mapping well to their issues and concerns gets you picked. So find out how the person you want to work for looks at the work that must be done.
Designing and posing questions a higher-order career skill not taught so far in advanced certification and degree programs.
This minute, your ideal next boss is as close as his or her mobile or desk, wishing you’d arrive on their radar with no effort on their part.
People believe things they say, more than things said to them. So to get across what you want them to know, turn it into a question.
What will you go ask next?
Mary-Frances Fox has defined and structured 7 kinds of career advancement conversations based on questions. She has privately mentored over 2300 people through significant career moves and career changes, using her Career Energy-Career Equity™ system to unlock their value, accelerate progress and as much as triple their pay in a single move.
A psychotherapist and entrepreneur who studied, managed and consulted on marketing for over 25 years and taught it at the college level, Fox gained a reputation for innovation as a senior consultant and manager in the outplacement industry and in 2000, went on to found Work Creatively International Inc., one of the first professional firms to help talent set their own career agendas and negotiate their pay.
Clients are those who work with ideas and people – in engineering, sales, marketing, design and communications, many in the ICT, manufacturing and financial sectors. Fox is also the GTA’s first David Neagle-Certified Coach Miracle of Money Mentor, teaching timeless principles to career candidates and self employed owners who want the clear mindset that allows the best money to flow in.
