When is an Offer Not an Offer?

I received an email from a woman who was “elated about an offer for employment for a long awaited job opportunity.”  She’d been looking for a while and hadn’t been having much luck.  Despite her elation, she went with her instinct and turned down the offer.  

They’d been “sweating” her about coming in for training while she was working notice on her current job.  She felt she needed to have fully resigned one job before she began another.  They countered with they needed to train her before she started with them. 

She wrote, because she wasn’t sure she’d made the right decision.  I told her she absolutely had made the right decision and applauded her for making it.  It takes guts to turn down an offer when you want a new job badly, even if you’re employed. 

That wasn’t a job offer.  It was “sort of” an offer.  It was a dangling carrot.  “Don’t quit your job yet because we want to see if we actually like you before you start, and if we don’t, then you won’t actually be starting, and you’ll still have a job.”

Later she emailed me again.  They’d been calling and “pestering” her.  She wanted to know how to handle it.  Not coincidentally, in this email she wrote  “this company is also known for its high turnover due to its unpleasant working environment.”  So perhaps they didn’t want her to quit because they realized she might quit them first, rather than what I’d initially surmised.

No matter.  Either way, it would have been a losing proposition for her to accept it.  Even if she’d made it through the transition she’d have been there just a few months, and having left her current job…where would she be? Nowhere.

So in answer to the pestering lady question, here’s what I advised:

Don’t give in or second guess yourself- stick with your original decision!  Just say “Thank you very much but I’ve decided to withdraw myself from consideration.  I’m no longer interested.”

If she calls again, repeat the message, but start with “As I said last time we spoke (etc)…”

And if she calls a third time, then it’s time to get a little….not rude or nasty, but certainly emphatically insistent.  “As I’ve told you twice, I am no longer interested in working with your company.  My decision is final.  Please do not call me again as I will not ever change my mind.”

Gotta be FIRM.  Not apologetic, not “nice.”  Just firm.  It’s a FIRM statement.  No room for debate.  As far as I’m concerned, if she calls a fourth time, just hang up on her! 

My point being, that at the point, the one who wasn’t getting it was the pestering lady and her invasive behavior.  If she hadn’t understood and respected the message by then, she probably wasn’t going to.  So why not save your breath and your energy?  

For those of you who might not have gone that route and worried about who knows you and who they know and if it would affect a job somewhere else and what about references and will it have an adverse effect, save your worrying.  The possibility of that is slim.  And quite frankly, anyone that knows this company and is worth working for (small things telling!), would probably call you precisely because you handled it as you did.

Resume Bullets: Informative or Boring?

The most problematic part of a resume for people seems to be crafting their accomplishments. The confusion between an accomplishment and a responsibility is the difference between generating excitement by selling what you can do, and making a bland statement that elicits the question “So what?”   It’s the difference between being invited in for an interview….and getting no response at all.           

A responsibility reads as if it was taken from your job description.  It fails to distinguish you from any other person that held that title before you, or holds that title at any other company.  It says your function, but it doesn’t speak to your ability to perform that function.           

By contrast, an accomplishment is what differentiates you from any other person that does, or has done, that job.  It not only indicates how well you perform your job, but what type of person you are.           

How does a factual accomplishment reveal something as subtle and subjective as a personality trait?  Measured with the length of time you were at a company, your number of accomplishments indicates the degree to which you are a go-getter.  It says if you’re motivated to go beyond the average job, and how much pride you take in your work.           

It tells the hiring authority if you look for problems and find ways to solve them, or if you are content with saying, “That’s good enough.”  And it also tells him how well you know your job by how well you solved those problems.  Let’s look at an example.  If you’re a teacher, a responsibility might read:

1. Developed innovative, education-based curriculum

Which leaves the following questions: 

1. For what classes did you develop a curriculum? 
2. Why did it need to be developed? 
3. What was going on before it was developed?
4. What was the result of the development? 

Interviewers want answers, not questions. Since the responsibility statement doesn’t indicate how well you performed your job, it’s easier not to invite you in for an interview. Interviewers don’t know if you have accomplishments hiding behind your responsibilities. They assume you don’t have anything to say, because you didn’t say it.  They don’t care that perhaps you didn’t know how to say it.  If your resume doesn’t sell you, it’s not their problem.  It’s yours.            

By contrast, the accomplishment version of the same statement might read:

1. Created and implemented innovative, education-based curriculum that engaged students more actively, resulting in 75% of student body raising grades by average of a full point  

This says you’re worth talking to.  Then at the interview, it opens the field for the interviewer to ask you for more information about what types of programs you implemented and how you implemented them           

An accomplishment is a results-oriented statement.  It shows the benefit of hiring you by telling what you can do.   What you’re saying is, “I know what you want done, and I’ve done that.  I’ve done it successfully for my previous company; therefore, I can do it successfully for you.  When you hire me, you aren’t risking an unknown.  You’re hiring someone who has a proven ability to do the job successfully.”           

That’s what interviewers want to know.  That’s what they want to hear.  They don’t want to wonder, and they don’t want to figure it out.  If your resume doesn’t indicate what you’re capable of, the chance of an interview in which to sell yourself is slim.           

If you’ve been sending out resumes and getting nothing in response, take a look at your bullets under each company name.  Do they just say what you did, or do they say how well you did it?

You’re selling a product, and the product is you.  The interviewer is the buyer, and your resume is, in effect, your marketing brochure.  But if the buyer isn’t interested, you can’t close the sale.  And that’s your problem, not theirs.

Resume Distribution Services = Waist of Your Money!

Resume distribution services are the biggest scam going.   But they’re seductive, aren’t they?  Only fifty bucks to reach thousands and thousands of recruiters and employers!  How can you miss? Easily.  What the blaster services have going for them is that potential customers, like you, respond to their marketing from your purely assumptive point of view, rather than applying logic or viewing it from the recipient’s.

To you, the odds sound tough to miss.  Thousands?  If even a few hundred respond, think of all the interviews you’ll have!  You’ve also assumed that the service has done their homework, carefully researching the validity of each address.  And perhaps even that they’ve forged relationships with these recruiters and employers, who are each, in turn, eagerly awaiting the next “blast” of resumes from the service.  Fallacy, fallacy, fallacy.

The email addresses aren’t qualified.  Usually they’ve been harvested, even if it’s from a legitimate source like The Kennedy Guide to Executive Recruiters. Consequently a large percentage bounce back, and for those addresses that are legitimate, your resume is viewed as spam, and more often than not, simply deleted.

Let’s start with a look at the Kennedy Guide, an extremely valuable tool, and one, by the way, that you can find in the reference section of any library, or purchase on line access to for $60.00.  Got that?  For about the same price, you can have the real thing and not the imitation.  And even so, you need the most recent edition because the info in it goes out of date quickly.

Additionally, I know one retained search firm that put a general catch-all email address in there.  They received so many resumes from it – many from blasting services – that every day or so, they just deleted the entire inbox.  Better you use the guide for the other wealth of information it provides, and call them to qualify their specialties and geographical area of concentration.  You can get the guide here:  www.kennedyinfo.com.  It’s absolutely worth the $60.00 online access price.

Employers who are actively hiring, receive enough unqualified resumes from their ads for specific positions without having to take the time to look at ones that come through a blind service for which they didn’t pay.  These companies already know that those resumes have nothing to do with their business or their hiring needs of the moment, 99% of the time.  For the other 1%, it’s not worth bothering to look.

 Recruiting firms too, receive massive amounts of resumes each week.  And while many firms cover multiple industries and disciplines, their data base is still probably 75% unusable.  I know; I was a recruiter for 20 years and was at several firms, both contingency and retained.  While it’s possible that some firms download the resumes from services, they simply go right into the database.  If you’re thinking the recruiters actually see them and study them when they arrive, you’re wrong.

 As a further example, because of my URL and email address, I’m on the list of many of these services.  So a few times per week, I get these resumes.  I’m not a recruiter.   I don’t collect them, send them, or have any interest in them, unless they’re my client, and my clients are job seekers, not employers.  So if I’m fooled enough to open the email, once I see what it is, I delete it.

 Faxing your resume is no different.  Fax spam is almost as insidious as email spam.  Roofing companies, mortgage refinancing firms, stock tips, local restaurant menus, it goes on and on.  Who looks at the fax spam?  It’s usually tossed right in the trash with nary a glance, unless, perhaps, you’re standing there waiting for a fax.

 This is what you’re paying for.  Your resume is being sent to addresses that aren’t valid and aren’t qualified.  It’s being send to, and received by, people who didn’t ask for it, don’t look at it, and don’t care.  If it still sounds too good to be true, remember what your mom told you when you were a kid:  if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.  File resume distribution services under that heading.