What Companies Look for When They Hire and The Feedback They Give

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

Have you ever received a phone call from a recruiter, either corporate or third party, with feedback after an interview and was told, “Sorry. Too light?”

As someone who has worked as a contract recruiter, agency recruiter, and coach, Jeff Brockman has heard the real feedback from employers about the people who his clients have interviewed and shares the mistakes job hunters have made that have caused the rejection.

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Hi, this is Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter, and welcome to Job Search Radio on webtalkradio.net. This is a time where I like to interview someone who I consider an expert on some element of job hunting. Because to me, job search doesn’t have to be hard, difficult, painful, or take so long. It’s just the skills needed to find a job are very different than the skills needed to do a job.

So I like to bring people in and talk with them about some element of job search so I can make this less complicated for you. And my guest on today’s show is Jeff Brockman. Jeff is a senior recruiting consultant and career coach with more than 17 years of experience.

Seven have been on the agency side, 10 in corporate recruiting. And he’s worked with firms of many sizes, shapes, and industries. Jeff, welcome to Job Search Radio.

Great to have you on. Thanks, Jeff. I appreciate you having me on.

You’re welcome. You know, 17 years in the search business, I’m sure you’ve reviewed and interviewed tens of thousands of people, and looked at even more resumes than that, and been a part of pre-interview briefings and post-interview debriefs, and been on the front lines, and all elements of hiring, both on the agency side and on the corporate side. I think the best place for me to start off with is how do people screw up in this process? Where do they go wrong that causes them to get rejected? Well, how long of a show is this? So, you know, that’s a great question, Jeff.

And there’s some key areas where that comes into play. I would say, just to point out kind of the top ones, it’s lack of preparation, lack of enthusiasm, not the appropriate amount of relevance for the specific role they’re interviewing for, and then lack of follow-up. So I would say one of the, if I’m gonna pinpoint one of the most important things that I hear, to your point, I do sit on a number of debrief calls.

In fact, any interview that takes place, I sit on the debrief call with the interview team. And one of the things that always is a kiss of death as it relates to someone being taken out of the process is when they ask you, how much do you know about us? How much do you know about our company, our organization, what we do? And there’s not a clear, concise answer to that. If you can’t express that you’ve taken time to do the research and get to know the company you’re interviewing with, it really can get you kicked out of the process pretty quickly.

So when you’re talking about lack of preparation, you’re talking about what they know about the firm. From my audience, I just wanna start by saying, we’re conceding that if you don’t do a good job in demonstrating your experience, and if you’re in certain fields with specific technical skills or professional skills, if you don’t demonstrate competence, obviously you’re gonna be rejected. But we’re dealing with all the secondary stuff beyond simply, you weren’t competent on the interview.

Okay, so when you speak of lack of preparation, is that purely about understanding what the firm does, or are there other parts of that? Absolutely, again, great question. It’s really about what the firm does. It’s about what the opportunity is about, and how your experience is relevant for that specific role.

You know, from the time a candidate steps into the door to be interviewed, they’re being evaluated. And whether consciously or subconsciously, if you do it in such a way where it’s not overly effective, or it appears that you haven’t done your research, or you know, really haven’t prepared in the right way, it’s reflective from the interviewer’s perspective that, hey, listen, this person really doesn’t have good attention to detail. They’re evaluating you as an individual, as well as you as a candidate the entire time.

And is this the person that we wanna work with? And we’re in a job market like we are right now, where companies are extremely mindful that headcount is very precious, and that they wanna ensure they’re not building an attrition by a bad hire. It’s very important that the candidates who come in and interview are doing it in such a way that this is their shot, and they really have to make sure that the impression that they’re making is gonna be a valuable one. You betcha.

I know that impression also starts in places where many job applicants don’t think of it. So for example, I have a client that flies people in for interviews. And one of the things that they do is they ask the driver who takes them from the airport about the person and their manners and how they conducted themselves.

When candidates have been rude to a receptionist at the front end of the interview before they’ve met anyone on the hiring team, I’ve known job applicants who’ve been rejected for such rudeness. So I just wanna remind everyone, an interview, you may think it starts when you meet the hiring manager, but it really does begin at the very, very beginning before you even see the hiring manager. And on phone calls, what sort of things, because remember, there’s phone interviews and in-person interviews.

I’m sure you’re getting debrief information from hiring managers and hiring teams after phone interviews. Does there tend to be any sort of difference between how the feedback that you get? Is it pretty consistent in terms of the complaints or criticisms? Well, when you’re taking phone interviews into consideration, independent of the ability, again, to interview effectively, you do have technical issues that can come into play. So obviously you wanna ensure that you’re ideally doing a phone interview from a landline and not your cell phone at a place where you could be potentially easily disconnected by interference.

Adapt!

You wanna be mindful of the voicemail message that you have on your phone, as an example. And the reason is you could have, I can’t tell you the number of candidates that I’ve called, and it’s a 10-minute rap song prior to them going to voicemail, sorry, the phone going to voicemail. The other thing that I always recommend is when you put a phone number on your resume, you should put your cell phone number on and not your home phone number.

And the reason being, you can control your cell phone, you can’t control who’s gonna pick up that phone at your house and how they’re gonna answer that phone. And again, keeping in mind, you’re always being evaluated whether it’s something that’s in your control or not. I wonder how many of these voicemail messages you’ve heard.

Ready? Hi, this is Michael. Hi, this is Sally. Hi, this is Moe.

And we’re the family. I can’t tell you how many of those I’ve heard. Absolutely, so.

And it happens all the time. And I’m surprised you admit to not liking rap music. Come on, get with it.

No problem with rap at all, no problem with rap at all. So we’ve been talking about lack of preparation before I got us off on this detour. So it’s not knowing enough about the firm is one aspect of lack of preparation.

Are there other factors that come into play with lack of preparation? Yeah, you know, there, you know, obviously things as it relates to the job, again, being prepared for this specific position itself. Lack of preparation with who you’re interviewing with. Again, you want to ensure that if you’re interviewing with an HR person, those questions that you have lined up are gonna be geared more for an HR perspective, benefits, compensation, those kinds of things.

If it’s with the hiring team, you want to focus things that are more related to the position, as opposed to, again, benefits and comp and things along those lines. Should a person ask on a first interview about benefits with HR, or is that something that should be deferred until later on? You know what, that’s a good question. And I think there’s different schools of thought.

I think one of the schools of thought is that none of that really matters until you’re being considered a viable candidate, but, you know, everything is being taken into consideration from a candidate perspective. And, you know, cause they’re evaluating the company just like the company is evaluating them. And you want to ensure that if you’re looking at an opportunity, you know, as a candidate, that it’s a, you understand it is a two-way street.

If those things are important to you, it’s absolutely okay, in my opinion, to get an understanding of what those components look like. I would keep it, again, with those questions with the HR person and not have those conversations with the hiring team. Definitely, you know, I keep thinking in terms of waiting on benefits until the very end.

So the offer’s about to be extended and then covering benefits with HR. You know, I was trained back in the stone ages where you try to keep the interview and every step along the way on demonstrating that all you want to do is learn, work hard, and get ahead and demonstrate excellence to your future employer. And the benefits, you know, take the attention away from doing that.

So that’s my opinion, folks. You can do either of these two, whatever you’re more comfortable with, whichever you prefer. And you also spoke about enthusiasm as being a factor.

Certainly, you don’t expect someone, you know, to act like they’re on a YouTube video. How should you- You know, yeah, yeah. Temporary that a little bit, no, absolutely.

You know, what I do on the career consulting side when I’m doing preparation with my clients is I want them to exercise that enthusiasm muscle for purposes of positions that they’re excited about and ones that they are lukewarm about. Because what it does, it gets you in the habit of obviously being excited about an opportunity. And that carries a lot of weight when you’re in an interview.

Again, if I go back to thinking about, you know, the interview debrief as an example, you know, when you have one candidate who’s a little bit lukewarm, right, in terms of personality, and then you have someone who’s extremely enthusiastic about the role, equally qualified candidates, for the most part, they’re gonna go with a person who seems more excited about the company, the opportunity. They’re grateful for being there. You know, they have that energy level of enthusiasm.

And I’m a big proponent of going after every interview, every job, like it’s the greatest thing in the world. I happen to agree with you. And I know one of the factors there is, you know, hiring managers hate to have their offers turned down because they feel like they have to justify what happened to their bosses.

So if you have a choice between the person who’s neutral and the one who’s passionate about, you know, how they present themselves and their interest in the role, it’s a no brainer of them. You know, why risk a turndown and having to start from square one or risk losing your number two candidate if you have someone who seems excited about the job? Right, right. And as an example, I’ve had situations where I’ve had clients and I’ve seen candidates who have gone in to an interview with expectations of, you know, I’ll go in and just see how it goes.

I’m not overly excited about the opportunity. And they kind of half-heartedly interview the initial part of the interview. And then as they continue to go on, they get more excited about it.

But by then it’s a little bit too late. And typically the feedback is they just didn’t show enough enthusiasm or they showed it too late. I agree with you.

We’re gonna talk more about that in a moment. But first we’re gonna do our job search insider tip for this show, which is gonna be brought by the LinkedIn Whisperer, Ron Nash. My job search insider tip is gonna be presented to you by Ron Nash, the LinkedIn Whisperer.

Ron, what’s your advice for my listeners for this show? My advice today is based on a story and it’s a real life story that I’ve lived. And I call it the bike ride that will save your life. Ooh, I like this title.

You know, so it’s based on something that goes on every day with us. First of all, I have a very active life. While I’m not in job search mode, I’m constantly in biz dev mode, meetings, et cetera.

So there are a lot of moving parts in my world and my brain goes into fight or flight. Now, what happened with me one morning specifically is I woke up, had a very busy day ahead of some very important, wonderful meetings, but for some strange reason, my anxiety was off the charts, Jeff. I gotta tell you, I’m not sure what happened.

And I’m a firm believer in that energy and anxiety is really undirected energy. So basically stress and anxiety is really undirected and I had to figure out a way to direct it. This particular- And this never happens to job hunters at all.

Job hunters neer get anxious about anything, do they? You know what? And that’s a very good point because depending where we are in the process, oftentimes fight or flight is triggered by stress or anxiety fairly easily and the brain doesn’t know whether a tiger’s chasing us or what’s going on. I mean, it literally believes that. So in this case, being from the background that I have, what I realized is that our physiology, how we move, how we act either enforces the stress or it can help change.

I’m a firm believer in changing. And so first thing I did was I measured how I was feeling and then I said, okay, I’m gonna try a few exercises. When that was not working out, I had to resort to drastic measures.

I jumped on my bicycle and I took a ride up a local mountain in our neighborhood. Now, don’t get me wrong, I had about an hour to burn because I was in preparation mode for my day. So I got on my bike and I started riding ferociously and I literally made it to the top of the hill which was an amazing goal.

But what I noticed in the process of that is that my brain started coming into focus, especially on the way up the hill when I felt like giving up. It’s like, oh my God, this is hard. And when I looked at the little small things, like when I looked at the top of the hill and saw how big it was, I wanted to stop riding.

But when I looked down at my tire at the ground, I never got distracted from what my outcome was. And thus you were able to pull yourself back into balance, get your focus, keep your focus for the meeting that you had and perform at 100% rather than being out of control. Do I have that right? I was able to create, remember that song, Eye of the Tiger from the Rocky movie? Don’t get me started.

Sorry folks, I’ll get motivated to sing and we don’t want that to happen. I was able to redirect the undirected energy and once again, stress and anxiety is undirected energy. I was able to pull that energy into focus and I learned a couple of simple tips.

Number one, don’t focus on the size of the problem. That can actually feel your stress, looks too big. Number two, don’t look too far ahead of the moment.

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If you get too far ahead of where you are, you’ll lose sight of the moment. And finally, be present, focus on your immediate situation. You’ll have the best success and the best ability to change what’s going on in the moment.

I love the fact that you have given people a way to learn how to be present because a lot of people tell you to be present but they don’t tell you how. And what this will do is get your adrenaline back into balance so that you’re no longer feeling out of control. Or even if you’re not feeling out of control, it’ll get you even into tighter control so that you can perform at your interviews or meetings.

Very nice tip, Ron, thank you. How can people reach you? Very simply, my website, www.theinacademy.com. That’s T-H-E-I-N-academy.com. Or on LinkedIn, you can find me as The In Academy. Ron, thank you, great tip.

My pleasure, sir. So let’s come back to Jeff and continue our conversation. And that lack of enthusiasm, I know people hold back at times in interviews, particularly at the beginning while they feel out the other person and figure out whether or not they should get attached to the job.

And suddenly, like you said, it becomes too late to do anything because they’ve already lost the interview through their lack of enthusiasm. So that kind of stuff comes in in the way of enthusiasm, lack of preparation comes in as a reason for rejection. Obviously, lack of skills, competence comes in as a reason for rejection.

Are there other things that come into play in your mind from the stories that you’ve heard from hiring managers for why they turn people down? Absolutely, yeah, we talk about, I think a key component is follow-up. You know, and again, you could play that in with the enthusiasm piece of it. But it’s so important that when you interview, especially if you’re interviewing with quite a few people, you wanna get business cards from every single person that you meet with, and for purposes of follow-up.

So, you know, not getting, again, sitting on debriefs and hearing, you know, I really seem like a good guy, but, you know, I didn’t even get a thank you email. It really is something that resonates with interviewers and hiring managers when someone doesn’t follow up, especially if they’re in a role where they really are client-facing, or if they’re in a sales role, or something where they are face-to-face with someone as part of their daily role. Because, again, how you interview is kind of how they’re gonna perceive you’re gonna be with their clients and with customers, or whoever you might be.

Exactly right. So what should a typical thank you note read like? What should someone say in the thank you note that will resonate with a hiring manager? Well, I’ve always found that the best way, especially if you’ve established a good relationship with that person, good rapport and everything else, it’s, I find it beneficial to say, you know, hi, Jeff, you know, as opposed to, you know, dear Mr. So-and-so. And for no other reason, you’ve gone beyond formalities at that point in time.

You’ve spent, you know, an hour or so together, you know, maybe have had, you know, good conversations and everything else. So I think, you know, a brief note, hey, Jeff, it was great meeting you today. You know, based on our conversation, extremely excited about the opportunity, even more so now, and really excited about next steps.

So just, you don’t have to have a big, long paragraph. It should really just be a quick note at the end of the day, just expressing your interest in moving on to the next step of the process. So you don’t believe that someone should use this as one more sales opportunity to reinforce some of the stuff that they may have mentioned in the interview.

So for example, you know, I just want to, you know, state unequivocally that, you know, I think my background with, and they might list two or three different items there, might be very beneficial to you in this particular role, or might help me hit the ground running in this role. That’s not necessary. They can just keep it as simple and as casual as what you just said.

Yeah, you know, I would say it depends, right? It depends on how the interview went. You’re gonna have to, you can feel that out. If you feel potentially, because it does give you a second opportunity, if you feel that maybe your point wasn’t, hadn’t gotten across as it relates to those specific bullet points during the interview and was accepted, then yeah, then absolutely.

It’s a terrific time to reiterate that. So for example, someone who may not think that they delivered the message quite clearly enough or effectively enough about their capability to do this role or some aspect of the job, might step in and, you know, maybe just say something along the lines of, in our conversation, I don’t think I necessarily communicated or got across my experience in this area. And then list a paragraph or two that might be relevant to what they’ve done related to the job.

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Could that work? Great, great. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Again, nothing, it is not gonna hurt you.

Let’s put it that way. It can only do good. Yeah, and folks, we in the recruiting business say time and time again, everything works.

Every idea that you hear on my shows works. It never works often enough, but they all work and sometimes don’t work with this particular hiring manager. So when you’re trying these ideas, number one, thank you letters, you’ve heard loud and clear.

The lack of sending one is a reason why hiring managers turn people down. So get back into the habit of sending thank you emails. And be as brief as what Jeff has suggested, or if you want another selling opportunity, you can go into more depth as I outlined earlier.

But thank you letters are a big part of the process. How else do people get turned down? Are there other things that they just mess up on that cause them to get rejected? Well, I can give you a fine example of an interview debrief call I was on today where the candidate got overly comfortable during the interview. And I would think this Jeff would go without saying, but profanity obviously is something you wanna stay away from during an interview, or anytime in the workplace.

But that was reason enough for the interview team to cringe a little bit about this individual as a candidate. I had an incident with someone, he was on the fourth interview. He’s talking to the overall executive vice president for the function of this firm.

The next step after this call is gonna be a fly out to meet everyone in California. He’s based in Canada. And everyone has liked him.

He has an unusual skill set that he’s the only one that they had found in four months of job hunting who had this skill, in four months of searching this skill. So he’s on with the executive vice president. They’re having a great time.

And then the profanity comes out. And then she asks a question, and he says something to the effect of, and I’ll show you that on the whiteboard when we meet in two weeks. And there was never an opportunity to present at the whiteboard.

He’d gotten so comfortable in speaking with her, he’d lost the point of he’s always selling. She’s not his friend. She’s someone there to evaluate and assess who will reflect upon her.

And he never got that chance to interview. So folks, be careful. As comfortable as you may get, and as friendly as the conversation may be, and as good a time as everyone’s having with one another, don’t cross the line.

So what else can people avoid doing? What sort of stories have you heard with mistakes job hunters make that causes them to get turned down? Well, I guess, as I kind of think about, I mean, there are one-off stories of everything that I’ve heard. I mean, obviously, kind of the key components that you want to focus on really are the small things, right? So you’re better off being there 15 minutes early than one minute late, obviously. Again, and keeping in mind, everything is perception.

Now, will any of this get you eliminated from the process? Not necessarily, but these are just little things that probably can help out as you continue. So, you know, I can’t tell you the number of people that I’ve interviewed who have coffee all over them because they wiped out on the way into the parking lot, getting there so quickly. You know, if you’re going on an interview and it’s in the city, make sure you have change in your car for a minute or a meter if you need it.

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So, Jeff, these are more things that, not necessarily get you kicked out of the process, but small things that can help, you know, when you are interviewing. And not only that, using the example of the meter and the coffee, you know, these are things that you do to yourself that cause you to be, to feel more pressure than is necessary. And when people feel too much pressure, and specifically the wrong kind of pressure, they don’t perform as well.

So, it’s not necessarily that you didn’t have money for the meter that’s causing you to be rejected, but the fact that you got anxious that you might be two minutes late for the interview because you didn’t have money for the meter is how that gets played out. And I had this quirky idea, Jeff, let’s see if you can play along with me. If you were to pretend you were briefing me for an interview and want to walk me through a couple of pointers, how would you brief me for my next interview? Well, again, I would go back to, you know, the preparation piece of it and the relevance piece.

So, you know, the first thing I do on the career consulting side of my clients is we vet them out their experience based on the requirements of the position. So, Jeff, as you know, you know, companies do have to evaluate you on what they deem as being the required skills, the minimum required skills. So we want to make sure that they are comfortable, that they are in alignment with those required skills.

So, you know, as an example, you want to either have, you know, direct skills or maybe even just some transferable skills as it relates to those. So I think part of the anxiety that people have when they go in for an interview is they’re not sure what questions are going to be asked and they’re not sure, you know, what’s going to happen. And really, you know, everything you need to know by reviewing that job description in complete detail and really ensuring that you’re in alignment with that.

That takes so much pressure off because that’s what you’re going in for. You’re being interviewed for that specific role. So if you’re comfortable with, you know, you’re hitting all the bullet points on each one of those, that should take some stress off right there.

You know, obviously, again, I’ll go back to doing the research and not only about the company, but also the culture. I found that, you know, a lot of companies now hire to the culture as opposed to, or in addition to, I should say, the position itself. So they want to make sure that they’re hiring people that they feel are going to fit in, right, with what the corporation, their values, their goals, their objectives.

So I found that a good way to do that, especially with a lot of the larger companies, is a lot of large companies have a YouTube channel. And on the YouTube channel, you’ll actually have employees that kind of talk about their experience with the company. So it gives you an opportunity to kind of get an insider’s perspective that, you know, you typically wouldn’t get from an interviewer.

So it’s, again, it’s just really that, I’ll go back to preparation, right? I mean, it kind of falls back into that space. That’s a nice tip about the YouTube channel, watching that, going to the Facebook pages as well, the professional pages on LinkedIn, of course, and of course, on the corporate website. All of these are going to give you different dimensions of the firm.

But prep me for an interview, come on. Do a formal prep. A lot of pressure here, let me tell you.

You know, again, what we would do when I’m prepping someone, it really is, I’m actually interviewing them based on the requirements of the position. So I’m looking at the job description, and to the best of my ability and my domain expertise as it relates to what they’re interviewing for, we’ll kind of ask them questions and kind of get their answers. And the other thing, a lot of places obviously utilize behavioral interviewing now as opposed to just standard old-fashioned interviewing.

So if you can understand or find out whether a company falls into that category, you can flesh out that behavioral interviewing piece of it, which basically is what past behavior will dictate future results. So it’s really making sure that you’re comfortable with every part of your background as well to be able to kind of answer to anything that you think might come up. So I actually, one of the things that I do with clients in terms of preparation, I ask them what they’re concerned about.

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