Strategy #36: Manage Doubts, Deviations And Dead-Ends

I present most of my job-search strategies from a best-case position. I do this because I want to encourage you to expect success in your upcoming work search and to give you every reason to be optimistic about getting hired by a great employer and fulfilling your career potential. However, for a training programme to be truly inclusive, I need to tell you about some of the problem areas that can sometimes derail you, and these challenges often crop up during a hiring meeting.

Knowing what these issues are likely to be will help you anticipate the inevitable glitches that may come your way, and prepare you for any difficulties if they cross your path. In my experience, there are half a dozen situations that can interfere with a hiring pitch and they are poor preparation on your part, insufficient time available to you, mismatched expectations, disagreement on the problem, refusal to accept the solution and a not-hiring-now position. 

Let’s run through each of these potential problems and consider some possible solutions if you’re unlucky enough to run into any of them.

1: Poor preparation

The first one to consider is poor preparation which is an obvious difficulty. While it’s the most profound hurdle in your way, it’s also the easiest one to overcome. There’s really no excuse for insufficient preparation, although I’ve come across Vocation Master course participants who readily admit to not being fully prepared during feedback sessions following unsuccessful hiring meetings. 

The answer is simple and you know what that is. Get down to business and do everything I talk about in these articles. In addition to putting in the basic groundwork, don’t forget that good preparation includes things such as mugging up on the recent business developments or familiarising yourself with the latest news from your industry that you can feed into your pitch.

But the most critical aspect of preparation is getting your head straight and keeping your mind focused on what matters most. If you do this, almost everything else will fall into place, so long as have a desire to perform at the peak of your abilities and you refuse to accept anything less than your best.

2: Insufficient time

The second potential problem comes in the shape of insufficient time being available to you, which might refer to being late for your meeting, but that’s not what I’ve got in mind here. Instead, you could find yourself in a meeting that’s truncated for some reason, or the hiring decision maker tells you in advance that they’ve only got ten minutes available or whatever. This is unquestionably a damaging constraint. You need a minimum of half an hour to pitch yourself properly, and more like forty-five minutes to an hour, depending on the complexity of your situation.

That’s five minutes to break the ice and cover introductions. You absolutely must devote at least fifteen minutes to your prepared pitch. This should be inked into the available time slot and you can’t abbreviate this phase without severely compromising yourself. Then, up to half an hour for expansion and a demonstration of how you’ll do the job, plus ten minutes to wrap up and gain commitment. For obvious reasons, rushing any of this isn’t helpful in any way at all.

If the hiring decision maker gives you advance notice of a significantly shortened time slot I recommend you reschedule. If you’re unexpectedly cut off in the middle of things, try to fix another date and pick up where you left off. The difficulty is that you’ve lost the element of freshness. Making an impact is what it’s all about and firing up a shortened pitch sometime later is a bit like reheating a delicious meal after it’s gone cold. It just isn’t the same the second time around.   

3: Mismatched expectations

The third of my problem areas is mismatched expectations. This is a serious problem if it happens, but not a devastating one. By mismatched expectations, I mean that the decision maker doesn’t realise why you’re having the meeting. This is usually because you, or your personal contact who’s introduced you, have failed to communicate effectively.

The typical result of this failure is that the decision maker thinks this is going to be an informal, get-to-know-you type meeting, rather than one in which you want to talk about important work possibilities. If it becomes evident that this is the situation, it’s a judgement call about whether or not you want to deliver your full pitch at this time. On balance, I think it’s better to only do so when the decision maker is primed for a serious conversation. Otherwise you risk losing your best shot at this employment target.

This is why you must spell out your purpose right at the start, and that means totally nailing the introduction stage of the hiring meeting. You must seize control of the agenda at all times, so you should also assert yourself immediately the meeting begins. Don’t be a shrinking violet who doesn’t state your case up front, thereby allowing for the possibility of the decision maker getting the wrong end of the stick.

4: Disagreement on the problem

The fourth of my potential difficulties is a disagreement on the problem, and this is a pretty tough one to get around. Assuming you’ve managed to outline the main business challenge as you understand it, the decision maker can only agree with the position as you present it or they can quibble with you. If it’s the latter, this isn’t a good way to conduct the rest of the meeting. The greater the disagreement, the worse it gets for you. If you’ve done your homework properly this situation shouldn’t arise, but it would be naïve to imagine that it’s not a possibility.

If this happens you have three options available to you. The first is to soldier on and hope for the best by blagging your way through the remainder of the pitch, although this requires a lot of improvisation and no little chutzpah. You might decide that there’s not much to lose, particularly if you have reason to believe that you’re only going to get one stab at convincing this person to give you a job. It will be an interesting pitch, to say the least, but you’ll have a great tale to tell at dinner parties in the future.

The second option is to excuse yourself immediately, retire and reformulate your pitch to accommodate the new problem which you’ll need to spend time and effort to assess. It’ll undoubtedly be an embarrassing few minutes when you explain that you’ve got it wrong, but you might decide that you can handle that if the opportunity justifies a seriously red face.

You’ll have to do some in-depth analysis of where you went wrong, then grovel your way back in if you can. You’ll possibly want a heart-to-heart conversation with the person who gave you bad information too. If you ask me, baling out is something you do once and once only, so I’d forget about this company if the results of my research were immediately blown out of the water.

The third option is the one I advocate and that’s to stop digging yourself into a hole. Apologise and explain that you’ve been wrongly informed and ask the decision maker to describe the main problem they face, right there in front of you. If it’s something you can adapt your pitch to, proceed accordingly. I must stress that this is not a great way of starting a pitch, but it’s probably the least worst solution to a disagreement about the business challenge you hope to solve.

5: Refusal to accept the solution

The fifth problem is a refusal to accept the solution. This is far worse than the decision maker disagreeing with you about the business problem. Your entire pitch is predicated upon them accepting the problem and the solution and, without both, you’re as good as sunk, especially if your proposed solution is the sticking point.

There’s some leeway if there are only a few minor technicalities involved, particularly if these are logistical rather than strategic. But if you get major objections to your proposal that don’t make much sense, there might be a hidden agenda that’s constraining the decision maker. This might be for confidential financial reasons or based on personnel issues that you’re probably not aware of.

The other possibility is that the person you’re meeting with is the problem. The boss must carry full responsibility for everything that goes on inside their department or business, including the multitude of problems that are part and parcel of every organisation’s operations. If they acknowledge a problem but wilfully refuse to consider a reasonable solution, and there doesn’t seem to be any other option available to you, it’s probably time to walk away. Do you really want to work for this sort of company in the first place?     

6: Not hiring now

The sixth of my problem areas is a not-hiring-now situation and this is one of the most common objections you’ll hear. A decision maker might welcome your proactive approach and praise your pitch. They may completely accept your description of the problem their business faces and embrace the solution you offer them. They could believe that you’re the right person and would love to offer you a position but for one small problem. And that is that there’s a hiring embargo.

It would be nice to think that logic prevails in a situation like this. If you can show that you’ll bring more money into the business than you’ll cost in salary and benefits, it stands to reason that you should be hired. Unfortunately, things don’t always work out this way, often for reasons that you cannot influence.

All you can do is state your case and appeal to reason. If you still hit a dead-end, take solace that there are some events in life which are beyond your control and these include strange company policy decisions, even if common sense dictates their stupidity.

Neil Grant, Vocation Master

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;

LinkedIn/VocationMaster