Here’s an email I got from a candidate Stout Systems is working with:

“I have put about 20 resumes out there in the last month, and not one company has expressed a flicker of interest. It’s hard to get across how shocked I am by this; I’m awfully good at what I do and I have never spent so long in a job search. Usually it takes about six weeks–this time it’s been six months, with only one onsite interview. I suppose that if I count them all up, I’ve sent out close to 100 copies of my resume since January. Usually I send…10?”

Boy, does this candidate speak for a lot of people!

In talking and emailing with candidates, we are often asked what to do to penetrate the gate keepers. Here are a few tips:

1. If you’re applying for a position that’s not in your geographic area, you are going to make a strong case for yourself if you say that you don’t need relocation assistance. You also make a strong case for yourself if you say that you’re trying to relocate to the area for a specific reason (like family, good schools, four seasons, no snow, whatever)

2. If you match a position well, call that out in your cover. If you are deficient in a particular skill, call that out, too, but say why you think it’s offset by your other strengths.

3. Network like crazy. Right now we’re inundated with resumes. I say “no” to many, many candidates. And this pains me [OUCH!] because most of them are quite skilled. With the number of applicants, only the exact match people are getting through the gate. THAT HAVING BEEN SAID, if I get a personal referral from someone we know, I pay a lot more attention to the resume. THIS IS VITALLY IMPORTANT to anyone who is becoming frustrated in his or her job search. Reaching out to everyone you’ve ever worked with and getting them to make introductions, walk your resume in to HR, etc. is the key thing to do. Use Linked In to find your former colleagues. Remember that most companies pay their employees a referral fee if they recommend someone who gets hired; so you might even be helping your friends even as they help you.

Go low tech. In today’s job market, you’ll find that the personal touch is the thing that will help the most.

Good luck if you’re job hunting. It is tough right now, but we have tiny signs of improving conditions.

FYI: I’m reading resumes this week, a job that my colleague Ursula Kellman normally does. She’s taking a well-deserved vacation, so I’m holding down the fort in her absence.

My eighteen year old son had his first job interview a few days ago. While prepping for the big event, he did some on-line research and located a list of common interview questions, and the best way to respond to them. We then practiced how he would answer the ones that I figured were most likely to arise. As it turned out, it was a purely technical interview and none of them even came up – but it did get me thinking about the topic of interview questions and how to best answer them. Top on my list was how one should answer each and every question that is asked, and my advice for that is something I read years ago:

“Say A Few Words” (SAFW)

S:  Make an opening Statement

A:  Amplify that statement

F:  Provide a Few examples

W:  Wrap it up

You can bet that interviewers will place just as much importance on how a candidate answers a question as they will on how correct the answer is – and in some cases, even more. In fact, just a few weeks back, I had two technically competent candidates rejected, in part because they violated some of the key points of this SAFW formula. So let’s briefly take a look at each of these.

First, keep in mind the sentence as a whole: Say a few words! Both of these candidates lost out on a good opportunity because they were FAR too verbose in their answers. Candidate who don’t know how to be brief and succinct in their answers are a huge red flag to hiring managers.

Some examples.

INTERVIEW QUESTION: Have you ever created a chocolate chip cookie recipe?

Opening Statement: Yes, I have.

Amplify that statement: From 2005-2008, that was my primary responsibility and I learned quite a bit during that time period about making chocolate chip cookies.

Provide a Few examples: I created a Choco-Chocolate chip cookie recipe for Gourmet Markets Baked Delights.  That one went on to become one of their best selling cookies. Prior to that, I designed a Macadamia White Chocolate Chip Cookie, for the One Horn Steak House chain, which actually won the prestigious Platinum Cookie Recipe award.

Wrap it Up: As a result of these experiences, I feel well qualified to create cookie recipes.

And then—very important—keep quiet and wait for the next question.

Aside from keeping it brief, probably the next most important aspect to this formula is providing a few examples.  It’s one thing to say you did something, but an entirely different one to provide the demonstrated proof behind your claim. It’s the difference between a mediocre connection and the solid whack of your driver against the ball letting you know before it’s even in the air that you’re landing on the green. Make your claim, but be prepared to back it up with some specifics.

Come up with some practice questions of your own, and practice applying SAFW. I guarantee that your interviews will be stronger as a result.

When it comes to candidates, we’ve all heard that it’s a buyer’s market out there for hiring managers. Many managers are receiving more resumes daily than they could ever hope to sort through. So how does one rise above the noise and stand out? This is something I have been giving much thought to lately.

I’ve never been a fan of unconventional resumes – they always tended to bump up against my conservative nature. Recently, however, I’ve been seeing them pop up here and there. And you know what? They get my attention. Yes, some of them are way over the top and wouldn’t be looked at twice unless they were being submitted for a creative advertising position. But I’m starting to think that in there somewhere is that sweet spot, the resume that visually stands out without offending but begs some further inspection.

Yes, if it gets that far, you still need to be able to deliver the goods, but I’m really beginning to consider the potential of these “alternative resumes”. More examples of these as well as the one shown here can be found in this Smashing Magazine article.

I would love to see any comments from any of you who have gotten a bit unconventional with your resumes.

A couple of weeks ago I sent out emails to a number of candidates we haven’t chatted with for a while. It’s not really my job, but I figure that if I were looking for work and didn’t hear from a recruiter, I’d wonder whether or not they had lost interest in me (or gotten run over by a bus or whatever). So I make it my business to keep in touch with candidates.

I have to confess, I find it interesting when I reach out like this.

It’s a sign of the times when I send out notes and hear back from a small fraction of the candidates. When that’s happening, it signifies that candidates have already found work and couldn’t be bothered to reply. That’s NOT what happened this time.

I heard back from about 70% of the people I emailed. Many of them responded to me within 24 hours.

Of those who replied, the vast majority confirmed that they are still looking for work. A lot of them are employed in unsatisfactory situations—either dead end jobs or unstable companies or contracts that are coming to an end soon. And a lot of them are unemployed, in some cases unemployed for a long time.

A few people told us that they found work in Michigan. And more told us that they found work outside of Michigan and, regrettably, had to take it.

I assume that those who didn’t reply at all are working again. At least I hope that’s the case.

We are seeing improvements. More projects finally coming on line. Many are small, but they are coming in. This is what we expect to see as things loosen up. It seems consistent with what our candidates are seeing, too.

Let’s hope that this is the upswing we’re all looking for!

By the way, we don’t lose interest in candidates. We just don’t have reason to call them unless/until a position comes in that looks like a match.

Here’s a cautionary tale I thought might be interesting since there is a higher level of competition for jobs right now.

Stout Systems recently landed a project doing substantial ASP.NET development. Given the complex nature of the project, we knew we needed to add a very skilled developer to our team.

We interviewed a number of people and put them through our standard screening process. As part of our routine procedure, we asked candidates for a code sample.

And this is where the story gets interesting…

We asked one promising developer for a code sample. After two days the code sample hit our inbox right on schedule. That afternoon, our technical architect for the project phoned me, “Uh…I don’t know how to say this, but this developer plagiarized the code sample.”

WHAT!?!

How we caught the cheat:

1. The first clue the sample was plagiarized was that the developer told us he didn’t have permission to share any of his commercial work and would have to custom-code something for us. Fair enough. So he sent us a massive and complex Web site (that no mere mortal would be able to write that quickly) and claimed to have prepared the entire thing over the weekend. Hmm…

2. With that clue, our technical architect got suspicious, pasted a code snippet into Google and ran a search. He got a direct and immediate hit. So he downloaded the code and compared it with the developer’s submission. It was a 100% match except where the author’s name was changed.  Even then, the original author’s name was left intact in a few places in the plagiarized version.

Unbelievable.

Needless to say, the embarrassed developer did not get the job.

I could tell more stories like this where people blew it by lying or faking. It is tempting, especially when you are competing for work in a tight job market. But in our experience, you’re better off laying your cards on the table and dealing with whatever the prospective employer throws at you.

Just a few weeks ago, a developer we know told us that he was certain he’d scared off a prospective employer by giving them his real salary history (which was much higher than the salary they were offering). After a delay of several weeks, the employer came back saying they had the green light to hire and presented him the offer. Now there is a great example of an honest success.