The Hired Fast Network Blog

As you know, the goal of Hired Fast Network is to help its clients find the jobs they want as quickly as possible. After all, most of us don’t have trust funds or other passive income, which means that we need to have a job to pay for our food and shelter.

What I’m going to say next, however, has nothing to do with anyone’s hiring process, but it’s still something that I hope everyone reading this will remember and internalize. I’m going to give you two important rules to follow, the first of which is, do not ever take any job offer just for the money. Take it only if you think you can learn more skills to help you in the long term. There are two major reasons for this. First, the concept of a lifetime career at one company is now extinct, so you always need to be thinking about how what you’re doing now can help you find the next job. The second reason is that it’s now important for everyone to learn the skills common to all businesses, such as project management and sales. You may not have heard this statement before, and that brings me to my second rule.

The second rule is that, when you already have a full-time job but need more money, DON’T start looking for a part-time job. You’re going to end up working much too hard for your money if you do this. Instead of putting your extra effort into a part-time job, put it into a part-time business of your own. Granted, you’re not likely to make millions or change the world when you do this for the first time in your working life. And that’s fine, because what you learn from your first company will automatically make you a better businessperson. You can’t learn these practices from an MBA program or by working for someone else. Unfortunately, too many people don’t recognize what they’ve learned, and simply give up on part-time businesses as soon as the first one fails. Don’t fall into that trap, either. Keep in mind that the potential for you to do great things still exists, however: Dell and Amazon were both started on a part-time basis. Don’t worry about making a brilliant product or “feeling passionate” about the product. Remember that the main goal is to improve yourself as a businessperson. The world is full of great products, but great businesspeople are rare. That’s what makes them rich.

Please look at our live training program to discover how you can achieve unprecedented success in marketing yourself to the companies you want to work for.

There’s a famous psychology study, conducted by Albert Mehrabian, that measures the factors in a face-to-face interaction between two people in an effort to determine what causes a positive or negative reaction. The study cited three factors: linguistics, or what a person says; paralinguistics, or how a person speaks (tone, inflection, emotion, and so on); and nonverbal clues, such as body language and facial expressions.

The most interesting conclusion in this study is how much each of these three factors influences whether the other person reacts positively or negatively. According to Mehrabian, nonverbal cues account for a whopping 55% of the reaction, paralinguistics account for 38%, and the actual words spoken have only 7% of the total emotional impact.

I have a similar theory about how hiring decisions are made, although I’ve never tested this theory scientifically. In my opinion, I estimate that about 55% of a hiring manager’s decision comes from personal chemistry with the candidate during the interview, another 38% is based on what the candidate says during the interview (and how he or she says it, of course), and the remaining 7% is based on the candidate’s resume.

Am I implying that your resume is unimportant? Not at all. Even if your resume accounts for only 7% of the decision, you may as well take every advantage you can get: even a small one. My point is that a resume isn’t worth obsessing over, as so many job seekers so often do. Keep it accurate, keep it neat, keep it well-organized, and make sure it showcases all your important accomplishments. Beyond that, there is very little else that you need to do with it.

Remember that hiring managers aren’t interested in your life story or in slick anecdotes; they are interested in their projects. Use your resume only to show examples of how your past experiences are similar to their projects - and how you can help them today.

Please look at our live training program to discover how you can achieve unprecedented success in marketing yourself to the companies you want to work for.

Has this ever happened to you? You show up for an interview, you spend several hours at the company, and the hiring manager and others ask you all the questions you were expecting to be asked. There are smiles and handshakes all around, and you feel you did well.

When you aren’t contacted again, you probably assume that you just didn’t get the position, which statistically is the most likely explanation. But maybe you hear about a friend of yours going to the same interview, for the same job, and running into a similar experience. Months go by, and you see the same position still being advertised. It’s not a case of HR neglecting to take down the ad, however, because apparently the company is still conducting interviews!

It may seem strange for a company to waste so much of its people’s time like this, but in some cases there’s a legitimate - but unethical - business reason. Companies that are constantly in the business news spotlight, especially the largest publicly traded ones, are always worried about investors’ perceptions of them. If it becomes obvious to the outside world that they aren’t hiring a single person for months on end, people are likely to conclude that the company is in trouble. The company gets around this problem by holding these kinds of mirage interviews as window dressing.

If that sounds like fraud to you, I agree. In fact, many companies have been questioned about it. The most common answer goes something like, “Well, we really do want to hire someone for this particular position, but the money isn’t there right now. So we’re just lining up candidates to call when we get the position funded.” Very often, this explanation is completely true. The company is banking on the fact that someone they interviewed three months ago is still going to be available when they contact him or her. And in this economy, that’s not an unreasonable risk to take.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what you should do if you believe you’re in one of these mirage interviews. The short answer is: pretend it’s real. The odds are that it is, especially if the company is small or privately held. The other thing to do is to make sure that you follow up with the hiring manager; just wait about 4 or 5 business days before you do. Keep calling back every couple of business days until you get a response, but always be friendly and polite when you call. You won’t torpedo your chances if you do this. And if it does turn out that you went to a mirage interview, the hiring manager is likely to say something like, “the job requisition was withdrawn.” Don’t despair: you could still be called back at some point. Personally, however, I think you’ll be better off at a company that’s more honest with its employees.

Please look at our live training program to discover how you can achieve unprecedented success in marketing yourself to the companies you want to work for.

In Western culture, there’s a major disconnect when we try to discuss depression, because we use the same ten-letter-word to mean radically different things.

“Depression” can mean anything from feeling down or in a sad mood to having a genuine medical problem. Clinical depression, as the latter is called, can affect absolutely anyone, whether they have a reason to be depressed or not, and it can’t be dealt with unless you have help from a qualified psychiatrist. Ironically, those who are suffering from it don’t feel depressed in the way that most of us understand the word. They feel like they’re in a living hell, in which none of their usual coping strategies work. Those who commit suicide are usually acting out of desperation to end those feelings.

Don’t be afraid, though: feeling down rarely leads to clinical depression. If you’re in the job market, however, it can still present a serious obstacle to your search. Especially if it goes on for too long. Playing the “waiting game” in your search usually leads only to worry, particularly financial worry. This approach is neither productive nor healthy. When you begin to sense that you’re shutting down, one very good coping mechanism is activity: any activity.

Do some organizing in your home office, check out a book from the fiction section of the library, or (one of the best options, in my opinion) create something. Write a short story, record a song, make a video, or build a birdhouse that doesn’t come from a kit. You don’t need to show your creation to anyone else, but it can be very helpful to look at when you’re trying to sell your candidacy on the phone later.

In addition, it’s extremely important that you keep normal business hours, even when you don’t spend most of the day on the phone. Disrupting your sleeping habits in either direction is bad for your overall mood.

Please look at our live training program to discover how you can achieve unprecedented success in marketing yourself to the companies you want to work for.