From a Former Company Director: Five Tips to Increase Your Chances of Getting Hired

Hello, and welcome to the blog! Today we're talking about getting hired. 

For those of you who haven't read my About Me page, I recently left a position as Director of Instructional Design at an instructional design company. Part of my responsibilities included posting jobs, and then interviewing and hiring new folks as needed. I'd love to share with you five tips to keep in mind as you apply and interview for new positions. Without further ado... 

Tip #1 for Getting Hired: Know What's Important to Important People

The first tip is the all-important tip, bleeding into all other tips, and the all-important tip is this: Know what's important to important people, and what's important to important people is being left alone.

Unless you're being hired in as Top Dog C.E.O., you'll have a supervisor, a boss, a manager, or a mentor. The job you're applying for was created because that person doesn't want to do the work they'll be asking you to do. Their plate is full and they need someone else to take on a set of tasks and responsibilities. They're going to interview you, hire you, get you started on your job, and then they want to be left alone. 

It's a little less serious than it sounds. Whoever is training you wants you to ask questions! They want you to learn and be comfortable in your new role, and they'll likely always be around to help you continue to learn, troubleshoot, and climb the company ladder. They also want you to be confident and become self-sufficient at some point. They have their workload to take care of, and they need you to be able to do your work so they can do theirs. If they wanted to do their work and your work all the time, they would have saved their money and not hired you. 

The important person, in this case, the person who is interviewing you, who has the power to yea or nay your entrance into their company, needs you to submit a résumé, application, and cover letter that show your ability to be independent. Highlight things you were able to teach yourself in previous positions (or in your schoolwork!) to show your ability to learn on your own. Call out leadership roles, especially if your leadership led a team to big successes, to show your ability to create a plan of action and follow through. In interviews, make sure to humble-brag and let your interviewer know about times you were flexible and agile and dealt with problems in a way that wrapped everything up nicely with a pretty bow on top. 

You've likely heard some of these résumé and interview tips before, but the heart of it all is that your management chain needs you to be capable of independence - they want to be left alone. 

A special note at the end of the first tip: This tip is very much tongue-in-cheek. Please don't be afraid to ask your management chain for help or go to them with problems. That's how we learn! 

Tip #2 for Getting Hired: Highlight Responsibility 

The second tip follows closely on the heels of the first: highlight your dependable, steadfast, rock-solid, responsible nature. 

Have you been at your current job for several years? Put it in your résumé and let your cover letter show your dedication and long-term outlook. Did you choose one degree plan and stick with it? There's more of that long-term outlook! 

Let your interviewer know you can hit a bumpy patch, work on a not-fun project, or dislike a coworker and keep going. You're able to meet goals and deadlines when other folks would give up or look for new work and to look ahead at the five-year landscape and focus on long-term rewards that come from sticking out short-term misfortunes. 

To your interviewer, this means that if they hire you, they're more likely to be getting an employee they can depend on to do hard or annoying work when a project gets tough or to remain professional when the rest of the office (virtual or in-person) gets gossipy. Your interviewer looks at your responsible side and says, "They'll be great for this exciting project we have coming up, and I won't have to hire someone new when we start that sure-to-be-boring project in the fall." 

Here, tip #2 touches base with tip #1. If your interviewer hires you and doesn't have to worry about you coming to their office to complain about so-and-so, or to talk about how boring your project is and you just can't bring yourself to get any work done because it isn't exciting, you will have left them alone. And they like being left alone, so now you're a star. Let that responsibility shine bright, friend!

Tip #3 for Getting Hired: Highlight Skills Gained 

Flip the second tip on its head and you get the third tip: highlight all of the skills you've gained from job hopping and degree-plan-switching. 

If you've held several positions in short order or stayed in school longer than you'd originally planned, that can create a résumé that looks troublesome at first glance. Without explanation, you can appear to be someone who gets mad and leaves, or gets bored and leaves, or doesn't get along and leaves. The end result is always that you'll leave, and your interviewer can be pretty sure you'll leave soon enough to not make hiring you worthwhile. 

Interviewers should be realistic - work is work, jobs are jobs, and folks will leave. People will move on for a number of reasons, and that happens. If your interviewer can look at your résumé and see a job history where you regularly leave a position after a year or two, though, they'll know you might be a headache in the short term (which is the opposite of leaving them alone!). 

If you like to move quickly, highlight your skills. Make sure your résumé and cover letter, application, and interview, showcase how each position put you closer to a career goal. Maybe you always moved for more money, or to hold a better title with more responsibility. That's an opportunity to show your drive and commitment to your personal career goals! Make your résumé reflect your reasons for moving to each new position - and please don't let it reflect "I got mad, so I left," even if that's the truth. Find some other reflection for your professional documents. 

If you moved from job to job because you weren't certain what career would be right for you, make sure to play up the unique skills each job added to your repertoire. Sales made you persuasive and able to think like your clients, documentation writing made you thorough, and cold-calling gave you the oomph to push through projects, face rejection, and still meet goals. You have skills you learned as a cashier, a waiter, an assistant, or a volunteer. Play them up! Make sure those skills are the highlight of your résumé, not the quick transition between jobs. 

Tip #4 for Getting Hired: Exercise Soft Skills 

The fourth tip: it's never too late to exercise those soft skills. Soft skills also highlight your dependability and should be at the top of your mind before hitting send on any applications or showing up for any interviews. 

Proofread your résumé, cover letter, and application before hitting "send." Misspellings, grammar snafus, and punctuation errors provide your first opportunity to show attention to detail. People who proofread their résumés, proofread their projects (hopefully), and make less work for the rest of the team. Less work for the rest of the team smooths and speeds project timelines. Smooth and speedy timelines are music to your boss's ears, and that's what we want when we're trying to get hired. A little proofreading goes a long way. 

Do your research! Look up the company's website, LinkedIn page, and any social media pages they might have. Look up your interviewer's LinkedIn page if you know your interviewer's name. You don't have to memorize everything you see, but be up-to-date on recent postings and what the company does. For larger companies in particular, it can be hard to determine from a job post what their overall business is. Knowing a bit about the company before you step into an interview keeps you from looking like a doofus when you can't keep up with company-specific questions because you aren't sure what line of business the company is in. 

A small note here: maybe consider staying away from your interviewer's social media pages, or the social media pages of any potential coworkers. Blurting out in an interview that you've been privy to some of your interviewer's personal details, or that you've been digitally stalking your coworkers, is crossing the boundary between professional and personal, and you do not personally know any of these people yet. If you find someone's personal social media pages, do yourself a favor and back out before you see anything. Keep it professional. 

Show up on time. SHOW. UP. ON. TIME. If you have trouble being on time, fix it. I get it - we have kids who are unpredictable and don't appreciate being on time for things, so we're late a lot. Or there was traffic or construction, or we had car problems, or our alarm didn't go off, or a million other things. Start planning ahead and do your absolute best to be on time for interviews, and to be on time for any job you're hired into. Set yourself up for success the night before - set out your clothes, pack your lunch, look up directions, and set two alarms if you need to. Prepare to arrive 15 minutes before your interview time and sit in the parking lot looking over your notes. Go in five minutes early. Do not give someone the impression that you're going to be the person who's always late. 

Being on time is an incredibly important soft skill! Let's say you get hired. You're late to meetings with your boss, which means they can't cover everything they needed to discuss on a meeting agenda, or they have to push other meetings on their calendar to later times to accommodate your lateness. Bad move on your part, and it should happen so infrequently you can't remember the last time it happened. Or let's say you move up the company ladder a bit and manage a team. You're late, and your team has questions or needs documentation. Your team has no idea when you'll show up, so they go to your boss, or to another team lead. Now your boss or other team leads are having to pause their work to deal with things that should be your responsibility because you aren't there, which means you're giving them a headache. Which is the opposite of leaving them alone. And giving people up the ladder headaches does not help you move up the ladder yourself. AND it all starts with being on time for an interview, which is your first opportunity to not be tardy. 

Tip #5 for Getting Hired: Use AI Wisely 

Finally, a fifth tip: use AI wisely. Please, please be careful with AI. If you refuse to adopt AI, you'll be left behind. So many industries are using AI to help them get ahead, and you'll want to start recognizing opportunities to use AI to your advantage. This shouldn't be stressful but should take a load off of your shoulders. In fact, use it to help do the research from tip #4! Log into ChatGPT and ask it what it knows about the company you'll be interviewing for. Ask it what the average salary is for the open position. Let it help you gather data you would otherwise scour Google to find. 

There are other ways AI can be useful, too. I had AI help me write a list of responsibilities and accomplishments to put on my résumé. I wrote out my job description, responsibilities, and details of projects completed and ongoing for the position I was leaving and asked ChatGPT to make it résumé-worthy. It produced a fancy list of bullet points that I cleaned up a bit and added to my résumé. 

There are plenty of ways AI can be hurtful, as well. I asked AI to write a cover letter for me. It was awful. This is where wisdom needs to come into play. Please be careful using the information you get from AI and adding it to résumés, cover letters, and applications. Tweak anything you're going to use to fit a professionally appropriate writing style. Read through what ChatGPT sends you and make sure it isn't just a bunch of AI fluff that will set you apart from your peers in a negative way. If you need to write something yourself, do it. Give up on using AI to write your cover letter if you read what it generates and don't even know how to begin salvaging it for your professional use. 

If you submit AI-generated fluff as a cover letter, the likelihood of your interviewer being able to tell that you put almost zero effort into your application is pretty high. It will reflect so poorly on you if you label yourself as the person who cuts corners and takes lazy shortcuts and then can't look at the fruit your lazy shortcut produced and see that it shouldn't be submitted to your management chain. It is a waste of someone's time to read AI fluff and have to tell you that they know it's AI fluff and that you aren't getting the job, and people who waste time for others on their team give the team headaches, and by now we can all say it together - that's the opposite of leaving them alone! 

It bears repeating - be careful with AI. Show that you know the difference between using AI to your advantage and using AI in a way that is sloppy and haphazard. 

The Bonus Tip 

A special bonus tip: dress appropriately. Many workplaces are becoming more casual, and with work-from-home positions opening up left and right, lots of us are spending significant time in clothes that should probably be left for post-interview movie-watching time. 

Dress in a way that is modest and does not make the people around you uncomfortable. Wear something nice and avoid anything that could pass as gym clothing (unless you're interviewing for a position in a gym, I guess). I'm reminded of a blog I read once upon a time called White Collar Glam. It looks like the site is currently under construction, but an Instagram page still exists for anyone interested! The author, Cheslie Kryst, is stunning and beautifully dressed. I remember reading a post she wrote where she talked about appropriate shoes for an office setting. To paraphrase a bit that stuck with me, she said that if you wore sandals and everyone could see your toes, and you couldn't see the toes of the man standing next to you, you would look less professional and underdressed. 

Your wedges are cute, but dress appropriately for the position you're applying for, and dress like you're just as professional as all of the men and women around you. Stay away from open-toed, low-cut, too short, anything that could be described as "beachy," and neon. Colorful, sure. Blinding, maybe not. 

That's all for this post! Let us know in the comments - what are your top tips for getting hired? 

All the love, 

Emily

Please feel free to contact me at admin@tulipsandbasil.com!