Strategy #2: Recognise That Normal Job Hunting Doesn't Work

I’ll start with a provocative idea. I contend that conventional recruitment procedures are terrible in almost every way and this is seriously bad news for you if you’re looking for a new job. This isn’t just an attention-grabbing statement because I truly believe that the usual ways of looking for different work, the ones that the vast majority of job hunters use all the time, are so fundamentally flawed that they’re barely fit for purpose. I want to explain what I mean by this so that you clearly understand the context to the new, much-improved method of job hunting that I’m going to tell you about in upcoming strategy articles.

Let’s begin by thinking about the overall aim of almost any normal recruitment procedure which is to match the most suitable worker with a specific job that needs to be done. This is a simple concept to get your head around and, on the face of it, is a perfectly good objective. It’s only when you unpack the details of how this process actually operates that you discover that things aren’t quite as straightforward as they might seem.

Employers spend prodigious amounts of time and money hiring new people, which is what justifies the existence of all those HR departments and internal interviewing teams, plus external recruitment agencies, online job board outfits and a plethora of associated employment services. I know very well how the system works because I spent many years as a hiring manager and interviewer for various companies I worked for. I also employed plenty of people for my own businesses so I’ve got a privileged perspective on this.

I used my long experience as a springboard to start my communication skills training company which focuses on helping executives to influence other people’s decisions and actions, one of the key abilities of any effective business person. A big part of my company’s activity revolves around job-interview techniques, a people skill like no other. I know how the established recruitment system works from the inside and my time in hiring staff and training budding interviewers tells me that it’s a dismayingly ineffective way of matching workers and jobs. 

I’ll give you a couple of pieces of supporting evidence for this claim. To begin with, almost half of all new recruits fail within 18 months of being hired, and multiple sources of well-researched data support this statistic. It’s not uncommon for employers to lose the value of a worker’s first year’s salary if they have to fire them for incompetence, because they’ve got a bad attitude or if they flunk within this period of time. Even extremely prestigious employers fall into this miserable state of affairs, despite their best efforts to avoid this scenario.

This is a systemic problem but it often comes down to an over-reliance on judging potential new staff by the sort of factual information that features in most resumes and CVs, compounded by seriously flawed interview protocols. Qualifications, work history, self-declared achievements, that sort of stuff. Time and again, it’s been proven that recruiters depend on supposedly objective data to sift the wheat from the chaff, but good evidence suggests that they place far too much weight on this area in relation to its actual importance in hiring outcomes.

 The trouble is that these things make it pretty easy to judge one candidate against another on a superficial basis, but they’re not good indicators of whether someone will necessarily be successful with a different employer, whether they’ll become a good employee or not. Previous successes are fine but there are much more critical issues at play.

Again, there’s been a lot of high-quality research into this and it’s the kind of hard-to-measure attitudinal factors, soft skillsets and corporate fit requirements that really matter. I could point you towards a whole stack of references about this but I won’t get side-tracked here. I do go into this in some detail in my full Job Search Masterclass course if you’re interested, however.

Anyway, you might be thinking that between-the-lines factors are what job interviews are designed to reveal. It’s when a recruiter gets face-to-face with a job applicant that they can make an informed decision about their likely success in the job, if they’re offered a position. Well, if that’s what you imagine, then think again. To show you what I mean, consider the words of a highly-placed executive at Google who gave an on-the-record interview to the New York Times.

At the time, Laszlo Bock was in charge of hiring new staff for Google and he freely admitted that there was zero relationship between interview and job performance. Interviews are a “complete, random mess” he told the newspaper, and as a representative of one of the world’s most prestigious employers, he ought to know what he’s talking about.

So much for bad recruitment and interview procedures from an employer’s point of view. Why should this be a concern for you, the job hunter? Well, you ought to be worried for a wide range of reasons, but I’ll offer just two for now.

First of all, if you submit yourself to a conventional job search you face enormous competition from hundreds of other people who all want the same job as you. On average, 250 people apply for each openly-advertised corporate vacancy. It’s sometimes far more, especially if it involves a good job with a high-ranking employer. With 1 winner and 249 losers, this is a contest that features a massive 99.6% failure rate. Does this alarm you?

If it doesn’t, you’ve probably been conditioned to believe that this is simply how things are, that there’s no other viable job-search method available to you, that you have to tough it out and take your chances against hundreds of other job applicants as a matter of course. However, you’d be wrong, as you’ll soon discover, because there’s a much better option that’s available to you.

Statistically speaking, 3% of applicants reach the final interview stage, and this is when things get really tough. If you’re lucky enough to get this far, it’s usually because the raw data featured on your CV, resume or application form has passed muster. Congratulations! But don’t get too excited just yet as the real screening has only just begun.

Job interviews are invariably extremely adversarial by their very nature, for the simple reason that most recruiters are primarily concerned about eliminating candidates who might be part of the substantial group of employees who’ll end up being dismissed within 18 months or so. You’ll be put under the cosh in order to expose your weaknesses and failings, so that the interviewer can justify dumping you. Here’s a recruiter’s trade secret: job interviews aren’t actually designed to find the best employee – they’re set up to vet you for the reject pile.

Proving that you’re made of the right stuff, that you’ll be a good fit, that your attitude is spot on and that you show that you comprehensively understand the requirements of the job, are difficult to do when you’re under pressure. Demonstrating your true value is hard to achieve because of the structural difficulties involved with standard interview procedures.

Top of the list of problems for you, the job candidate, is a searing lack of agency, considering that the interviewer almost always controls the format and substance of the meeting. This is why they’ll put you under pressure in the expectation that you’ll reveal bad stuff you’d prefer to keep quiet about instead of encouraging you to prove your ability to do the job. I’m only scratching the surface here and there are plenty of other challenges you face, some of which I talk about in my free Job Interview Secrets mini-course. I strongly recommend you take a look at that.

You’ve probably realised by now that I’m not a big fan of standard job-hunting procedures. However, there’s a simple way out that eliminates all of the problems that I’ve spoken about here, and the myriad other difficulties that are intrinsic to a dysfunctional recruitment system. What you have to do is copy the strategies that the most successful job hunters use, to emulate the actions used by people who never struggle to find high-quality work with fantastic employers.

I’ve identified the patterns that elite job changers deploy, how they get the best jobs with the most prestigious employers, and built my entire training programme around these techniques. This is what you’ll be learning about very soon, starting with strategy article 3 which is coming up next.

I’ll be outlining their thinking processes and specific job-search methods which cut through any resistance, so make sure you check in for that. It’s quite simply the most reliable template you can follow if you want to be super-successful in any job hunt.

Neil Grant, Vocation Master, London, September 2023

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions about the issues I raise here, I invite you to contact me personally. Please get in touch via LinkedIn;

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