Getting Hired in 2020
Getting Hired in 2020
It isn’t easy, is it?
You probably knew this already, but when I was interviewing Simon Leslie, CEO of Ink, for my talk show Acumen, he said,
“For every job you apply for, you’ll be going up against 50-60 other, skilled people”.
… and I think those numbers might be low.
For the first time in a decade, Simon pointed out, we’re in a place where skilled talent outstrips demand.
Here’s the thing. I think – and Simon agrees – you need to stand out and push yourself. Here are a few things I recommend.
Go Direct
It’s all names and numbers to recruiters. They have positions to fill and due process to follow in order to fill those position.
But the real people with the power to hire you on the spot are the ones running the business or the department. If a business has the capacity to take on another person (i.e. they’re in a financially stable position) and you convince the CEO or head of department that you’ve got something special to contribute to the business, they can turn to HR and say – get this person through the process, I want them on my team.
You can’t WOW someone if you’re just another person who can fulfil the role that they’re looking to fill. They’ll find plenty of people like that.
You need to show that you’ll
Make their results better
Make their lives easier
Make their results better
Start by bringing ideas to the table. What are they not doing, that you can add? How does it benefit them?
How would you take what they are doing and add your special touch to it, to make it better?
You’d never sell a piece of art by saying, “this is a 1m canvas with colours including green, red and black. Its purpose is to be hung on a wall as decorations”.
You’d say something like, “this is a striking piece of art that fills a room with drama. The deep reds and greens inspire passion and the black shapes give it a sleek, technological feel. As the piece complements your boardroom or reception area, visitors will be drawn to the prestige and attention to detail in your offices. At 1m, it’s big enough to occupy a wall on its own without the need to spend on multiple pieces of art, but small enough to not create a cluttered feeling.”
You’re like the piece of art. You can write, talk, design, program, analyse… whatever. So can many other people. We’ve got a process for finding those people.
You’re going to use your skills to earn us money? To increase our reach? To improve our product and make us better than the competitors? You’re going to bring some spice to the salad, some sizzle to the steak?
Now you’ve got me interested. But I’m not quite ready to start writing cheques.
Make their lives easier.
End by showing you’re hassle free and hard-working. It’s basic, but it’s unfortunately rare so that managers need to hear it.
As Simon put it, “You’re not going to have any problems with me. I’m going to be first in, I’m going to be last out. Whatever target you set me, I’m going to try and beat it.”
This is demonstrating that you have the right attitude. That’s music to a manager’s ears, because they know you’ll be easy to lead.
Get the right people
In general, hiring managers in HR departments aren’t impressed by these. It won’t work if you’re going through the direct channels.
But department heads? People who have the power to hire but responsibility for something else – something where you bring a good offer to the table?
They’re your target.
Attract Attention
Once again, finding a job is not dissimilar to selling a product.
As soon as you reach out to someone, you’re the one in need, they’re the one with the power. It’s an imbalance and not in your favour.
I’m not saying don’t do it – of course you should. And there are many ways to reduce the imbalance and improve your chances of success.
But what if they could come to you? Or at least, if when you went to them, the imbalance of power was more even?
Think back to when you were thirteen years old and teams were being picked for a football match in school. There would be two captains who would alternate choosing people.
It usually resulted in pretty evenly matched teams, as they’d alternate in picking the best players.
(The system actually sucked, because it was largely tied to popularity and made a lot of kids feel left out as time after time they’d be picked last).
But the point is, the kids who were either the best at football, the most popular in the class or a combination of both, would regularly get picked first.
Everyone wanted that kid who could out-dribble the entire opposition team and land a free kick from the half-way line. Everyone knew who that kid was. The captains knew that whoever got to choose first, would choose that kid. The rest of the class knew that they weren’t going to be picked first, because that kid was.
That kid had a brand. A reputation. A name.
And though they generally played in their own class, the name carried weight throughout the school. The brand was recognised.
So not only did that kid get picked first when the teacher said you’d be playing football in PE, but if the kid walked up to an older year-group during lunch break and asked to join their match, they’d probably consider it.
There’s no guarantee the older kids would say yes – they probably wouldn’t fight over footballer from the year below.
But they’d be willing to offer a chance.
And that’s all you need.
A chance – that most of the other kids in the year below would never get.
So to get hired, start attracting attention.
Old CV advice is out of date
You’ve probably been told that your CV should be A4, two pages, black and white. It should start with your name, email, phone number and address, then include your education, qualifications, career history and a few other sections – such as languages and maybe computing.
The fact that many “career advisors” are still telling people – any time after 2010 – to include the fact that they’re “proficient in Word and PowerPoint” on their CV is the ultimate proof that they’re out of date.
If you’re not proficient in Word, PowerPoint, Excel and sending emails… you should be looking for work as a farmer or something. I think some local libraries still offer basic computing classes for free, on their 2007 Windows XPs. Try signing up for one.
Anyway, the main reason the CV advice is out of date is because it assumes that there’s a human being responsible for going through and reading all the CVs.
(Spoiler: there isn’t)
The wisdom was that hiring managers would receive stacks of CVs and scan each one. There was some statistic, like “the average CV gets a first glance of just 8 seconds before being discarded”.
You had to keep it plain, because they weren’t capable of handling anything else. They were so overwhelmed, they needed the repeatability.
But that doesn’t happen any more – because some clever people who were proficient in a bit more than Word and PowerPoint created something called an Applicant Tracking System or ATS.
Large companies use ATSs to manage their job postings. You might not notice it, but the careers pages on their website tend to either have the ATS widget embedded or take you to a subdomain that points to the ATS providers site.
You find the job you want, click apply and fill out the fields. Then you get to the CV and cover letter section and upload two, carefully formatted PDFs, having spent ages getting the line spacing and fonts right.
But then the ATS does something called parsing. It scans the document and parses the information – finding the key points and copying the text.
It then matches the requirements of the job description to what it can find in your CV, to the best of its ability. It probably also ranks your CV – seeing how many times the same keywords appear, how many years of experience you have, etc.
The reason many a strong application gets dismissed out of hand is because the ATS gets confused. If your CV trips the system up, you lose.
So if you’re going for the mass-online-application approach, sure, prepare the standard CV.
But if you’re already going to all the effort to track down the decision-maker… why on earth would you do anything standard?
So ignore the standard CV advice and make something special.
Stop thinking about it as a job application and start thinking about it as a sale.
The value of the sale? Let’s just say your commission alone is the salary of the job * three years. That’s how big this sale is to you.
For a sale that big… you don’t do two pages of plain A4.
You plan out your positioning. Craft your messaging. Carefully structure a sales deck. And do your best to come up with a great idea which the person you’re targeting will remember.
Maybe it’s a video CV. Maybe it’s a CV made to look like a recipe book with a restaurant chain’s branding. Maybe it’s a teabag sellotaped to the back of a CV (if you’ve watched S1E1 of Acumen, you’ll know what I’m talking about and whether the guy got hired…).
In a nutshell
My getting hired advice, in bullet points.
Stand out
Attract attention
Find the right people
Be remembered
Tell them what they want to hear
Sell a vision of the outcome, not a list of your attributes.
Try it. You can always go back to 2 pages of A4 text afterwards.
