You're not as qualified as you think you are

I got a call yesterday from a very attractive company that they made an offer to another candidate. Here's the feedback, paraphrased and condensed.

• We need someone who can hit the ground running. The candidate we selected had more years hands-on experience doing ... [insert two common training design, project management tasks]
• We think that your skills are best suited to a role called [job title]. I had asked what skills I should practice to be better suited to the job that I'd not won; that answer was, start lower and show us what you've got.
• We can't recommend a better way to establish a relationship with this company when it comes to hiring for that role; keep an eye on the web site. I had asked, what's the best way to uncover new opportunities when there are job openings by that name.
  

To give the company its due, this is more complete and concrete feedback than I've received from any of those I've interviewed with. The sting of not being chosen was softened by the knowledge, implied in the discussion above, that interviewers force ranked candidates' capabilities.

Even if I had been nominally qualified, I lost the horse race at a time when a lot of strong horses are in the recession - oh, did I say "recession?" - I meant "race." And the candidate horse race is the black box of the interview process. It's fast moving, difficult to learn about, and difficult to influence.

Lessons

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change..."

• Job experience is limiting. Even CEOs must accept this truism.
• Big companies approach many decisions as an opportunity to mitigate risk, making hiring an exercise in seeking the sure thing. Experience proves, they're right to do so.

"...the courage to change the things I can..."

• Determine whether the message of the stories of your experience fits your job search goals (individual contributor, creative force, expert practitioner, strategic and forward thinker?)
• Review and refine the stories of your accomplishments.
• Identify, and learn enough to speak confidently about, the expertise you anticipate needing for particular roles. If you can't be experienced, you can master the knowledge.
• Pick some area of weakness and invest in your own development.
  

"...and the wisdom to know the difference."

• It's human nature to lean toward those things we want, and when they're pulled out from under us, that pratfall stings.
• Jobs are best seen as serving instrumental goals - learning, acquiring broader scope of responsibility, linking one's actions to business results, doing incremental good.
  
• Jobs are best not seen as serving fundamental goals - making one happy, saving the world, providing social support.
  

Two interviews

Nothing takes the place of interviewing with hiring managers. All the practice pays off. And the sharp and flat notes seem very loud.

In April, I interviewed with a financial services company. What did I learn? Two things:

Ask for clarification about what the interviewer is asking.

Seems so simple. You think you understand the question you're answering, and if you're like me you select the anecdote that makes your germane experience and skills concrete. But if you're off the mark a bit, or if the question only hints at the real issue, you'll spend minutes guessing why you're not connecting.

If you were like me in this interview, you'd reframe the story in the middle of the telling. Your story starts to sound abstract, the flop sweat trickles in the small of your back, and you realize he's not so sure about your sense of judgment anymore, "Does this guy get it?" you think you smell him thinking.

In another recent interview, I asked for clarification about the heart of the issue. Because in the first situation above, I suspect that the question had to do with organizatonal pain that senior manager was suffering that week (or that quarter, granting the benefit of the doubt). I don't think that I was required to have experience doing exactly what she believed she needed. But I missed the opportunity to describe how I could focus on the heart of the issue. Here's what I mean.

The question. "Tell me about a time when you have successfully negotiated with clients."

Connotation is everything. "Negotiation" connotes irreconcilable differences resolved through zero-sum gamesmanship: banging shoes on desks, non-stop meetings, and theatrical psychodrama that ends with reluctant compromise whose success is measured in terms of who was bruised more and gave up the most. I don't do that. I fire clients who do that.

But, too belatedly, I realized that throughout every learning project, I negotiate dozens of compromises over scope, budget, method, schedule - even whether or not to use role plays. The guideline, and the process, runs this way:

• Aim high
• Argue cogently
• Listen and accept new information; seek out new approaches
  
• Take real limitations seriously
• Find an effective method to create engaging learning that accounts for all of those factors.
  

That's negotiation if you like, but I call it good project management with a dose of brainstorming and imagination. Little drama; lots of collaboration.

Coaching: Addressing Unclear Questions

There are a number of good follow-up questions I could have asked.

Clarifying:

• I'd like to speak to that, but what do clients commonly feel a need to negotiate about?
• Happy to answer. Could you give me a recent example of the kind of situation you're thinking of so that I can understand the issue better?

Demonstrating understanding and insight

• When I think of negotiating, I think of situations in which the two sides have hardened positions aren't willing to change, or only very reluctantly? How well does that describe the kind of negotiating you're thinking of?
• Help me understand the situation better. What's at risk if the person doesn't negiatate well?
  

Working on it

When a man doesn't have enough to do, he does what he can.

Not the thing he always dreamed of. Or the things that would save a little money, like sealing windows. Not the things that the world needs, like helping at an after school program or working for Hil-bama.

He spends as much time as he can learning the things that working left too little time for. He reads about things he's interested in, wondering if there's a career change to be made. Excitement follows. He talks about, let's say, a job in information architecture. He learns more about it and concludes it's nothing like what he imagined.

And the career he had - has - looks pretty good again. Everything considered. Did you know that Monster.com will deliver job listing directly to your - his - email box? He applies. He's doing what he can.

He cooks and cleans and does laundry, because if he's not working hard he can hold up his end of home life. And he's not complaining. He likes to cook.

He also writes comments on blogs, reads a few dozen feeds, checks out source material for ideas mentioned in passing on other's websites. Some seem worth knowing about. He buys a book to check them out. Some of those idea seem like something to talk about rather than something to know about deeply. The kind of topic that someone, who has already become the expert, has also already exhausted.

He cannot stay cheery every day, but he tries not to mope.

the tour continues

I've revived the Tour to track the very personal ups and downs of job hunting and exploring what I learn. Here, all bets are off, including the sunny optimism that bloggers who want an audience wisely adopt. The Tour is a job hunter in a down economy talking to the camera in a closet on a reality show. Or with buddies over a beer.

I went to a meeting recently to learn about Web 2.0 in the enterprise environment. It seemed to me that a lot of very smart people were thrashing around and not answering the question, "How will we know when "collaboration tools" (read Web 2.0) will be worth it?" There were a lot of worriers wringing their hands about privacy and security. And a lot of others saying that the tools don't do what they need them to do: sort, extract data, offer search, integrate with other tools. The implied answer to the question is "What's the minimum set of conditions that collaboration must meet to make it worth time and money to try it out?" A list of things, some opportunities and some risks. When you get close to that spec, you evaluate again.

What's everyone so worried about?

I suppose it's a fear of getting bitten by technology choices. The case study company that presented at the meeting is building social networking tools behind their corporate moat to address security and privacy concerns. But that means as their tech. vendors grow, change, and are bought, there's no telling how well the products will serve their customer. A few dizzy dot com years ago, a web team I was on made a purchase decision only to find the company was out of business before they could install the software. We consumers, working in the public space, don't have to worry about that. We decide we don't like del.icio.us anymore, we move on. But for organization men, it's a fair worry.

I suppose the second worry, though less discussed, is that some of the most useful people in the corporate social network may be the least productive. They're busy blogging, referring, pointing to resources, and fostering a discussion. Which in fact, is productive, unless it's not measured. If no one measures the value of "connector" roles, then those folks are just farting around on the internet.