If you were an animal...?

I recently read an article in which a career consultant argued that a candidate may as well pack up and go home if an interview was "degenerating into off-the-wall" questions like "if you were an animal what kind of animal would you be?"

His reasoning was that the interviewer does not respect the candidate and they are unlikely to get any further.

I disagree.

These "killer" questions are often the best way to examine self-awareness and for two reasons. 1) there are so many variants that you can't read a book to tell you how to answer them - you're on your own, and 2) They are so disconnected from the role that you really do need to have self-awareness and the ability to think on your feet to answer them well.

Another version of the "killer" question is the one where there is no known answer. "How many sheep are there in Wales?" Of course, you're not expected to know the answer, what the interviewer is interested in is how you answer. Three million? How did you come to that conclusion? A random guess tells them something about you as does the willingness to offer an immediate gut reply. Alternatively you might explain a process for finding out the answer like contacting the ministry for agriculture (or whatever they are called at the time you are reading this), or multiplying an estimate of the average flock size by the number of sheep farmers. It doesn't matter what your answer is because the interesting thing is how you arrive at it.

Don't under-estimate these questions. I can help someone to predict very accurately what they will be asked in an interview so far as it pertains to the role and the competencies required, but I can't coach you for the killer questions and a good answer can make a difference because it is an open window on how you operate and how well you know yourself.

The least you should expect of a recruiter

When I worked in recruitment I was given a very good piece of advice by an experienced search consultant. He said "Never forget that it is the candidate who provides the fee, the client just handles the money".

Unfortunately very few agencies see it this way. Being ignored once the employing organisation has decided not to take a candidate forward is typical rather than exceptional. I recently read of one person who was told that if the agency chased up on every "no" candidate they'd go bust. Not only is this an incredibly demeaning and disheartening thing to hear, it's wrong.


As a minimum, I would expect the following from any recruitment business:

1) A face to face interview before doing anything except in extreme circumstances

2) Full briefing with job description / person spec before putting a candidate forward. this includes disclosing the name of the organisation in question!

3) No CV put forward until the candidate has given clear permission.

4) If the candidate is invited for interview to provide a full and accurate briefing on to the nature of the interview process and who they will be meeting (job title/s)

5) Feedback within 2 working days or give a date when feedback will be provided in cases where the interview process is spread out. The feedback should be specific advice as to how the candidate performed, where they could have done better or how other candidates outperformed them, i.e. something that they can learn from for the future, rather than "sorry, your application is not being taken further because other candidates were better suited to the role".

I realise this isn't always as easy as all that to provide because it's down to the employing organisation to provide much of this information and many of them take the same disregarding attitude as recruiters. However, if recruiters made it clear that this is how they look after their candidates and they made the effort to get the feedback I am convinced that far from going bust, they would do their reputation enormous good and attract the best candidates which, as I mentioned at the beginning of this response, is where the money comes from.

I'm never going to be a success.

According to this chap I need to be so passionate about something that I'm prepared to blog and tweet and answer questions about it all day every day if I want to be a success. It worked for him with his wine business, (so much so that it appears he now spends more time telling big companies how to listen to their customers on the internet than he does selling wine).

He makes webTV programmes and gets paid thousands for product placements because so many people watch his wine shows.

I love hearing stories about people who are passionate, and I'm all in favour of "monetising" (ugh, what an awful word) that passion. (By the way I've already written about my views on the word "passion" but I'll let that go for now - I'm pretending the word they use is "enthusiasm"). Anyway, I'm all for enthusiasm but it seems to me that what this guy is saying is you need to be obsessive, and that's surely not healthy.

Personally I can't get there. I love helping people with their work stuff, and I love my music, I love my sport, I love my family. Life is more than work. What about spiritual development? What about health? What about art and culture? What about sitting around doing nothing?

So, if the name of the game is focusing on one thing, online, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, then I guess I'll have to resign myself to being a failure.

Good. Glad that's sorted then.

Careers advice for primary school children

I recently attended a careers evening for girls in years 9 - 13 at my daughter's school. It was a well run event, with people from a wide range of occupations, mainly professional, answering questions about their area of work. I was there to answer general questions about careers.

I took the invitation as an opportunity to test my reservations about events of this kind for youngsters. I have long felt that a) schools careers advice is utter, utter rubbish (my friend Andrew, a resident of Hendon, north London famously attended the one and only careers advice session our school offered and announced his ambition to be a shepherd. The counsellor simply told him there weren't any local courses he knew of for that), and b) there is no point in trying to guide people of school age in their career decisions because all it does is limit their imagination and ultimately their possibilities.

On the whole I think I'm right to be wary of schools careers guidance having attended the evening. What struck me most was the number of girls who seemed to feel that they should choose subjects that would lead to careers that their parents believed would be wise areas to get into. You can guess - law, accountancy, medicine (OK, it's a very middle class school). I took great pleasure, especially when their parents were twitching alongside, expecting me to back up their advice, in telling the girls that the subjects they should be thinking about for A levels and undergraduate degrees should be the ones that interested and excited them the most.

There's always time to choose a career, and with the exception of medicine, architecture and possibly one or two others, nothing is closed off at the point that degrees are chosen. Indeed, one solicitor I was talking to said that law firms prefer people with non-law degrees who have then undertaken a conversation course. Their motivation is often better because they have made an informed, mature choice to study law.


Yesterday I read that the government, in an attempt to motivate children to take school seriously, isintroducing a new careers guidance initiative. In some respects it's not a bad idea. I'm all for letting children learning about the world of work and different jobs, but do they really think that children this young will be sufficiently inspired to pursue a diligent school career because someone came in to tell them about what it's like to be a town planner or motor mechanic?

But that's not all of it. They actually want parents to start thinking about what careers their primary school age children might be interested in. Are they crazy? Most people don't settle on a career until their late 20's or early 30's. That's after trying several different types of work, experiencing different working environments, and working with a range of different people and personalities. How on earth can anyone know what a child will end up doing as an adult and what possible point is there in trying to anticipate such a thing?

If the Government wants to encourage children to be good students who aspire to a university education, the answer is not to suggest that if they don't work hard they won't be able to have this "dream job" that means nothing at all to them, the answer is to get them to love education for its own sake. That means investment in education and inspirational and committed teachers who love to see children reach their potential, and not a system based on targets and bureaucracy.

Do people really need to be told this stuff?

Working in any field means that we can tend to take some things for granted. As someone who has specialised in helping people to succeed at interviews I know the type of thing I need to focus on in coaching. Or at least I thought I did.


Then I saw this on the Times Online website and asked myself if people really need to be coached on this type of thing, or is it just some bandwith filler?

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/career_and_jobs/article6575431.ece


Do you think these are helpful tips? Should I be dumbing down my coaching to this level?

Workjoy's Wordle

I love this little application.






You can do your own here http://www.wordle.net/

If you want something you must work for it.

Isn’t this a crazy maxim? What on earth is the point of working hard for something when there is an inverse correlation between material wealth and the amount of time one has to enjoy that wealth?

Time is the only thing that is finite to us. Surely what any sane, rational person should be doing is looking for ways to extend the amount of time they have control over? Instead we have made ourselves slaves to work, and therefore we give away our time to something that brings us no pleasure.

Now before you start telling me that you love your job and would choose to do it even if you didn’t earn anything for it, then all I can say is you are sadly disillusioned.

Nobody would choose to do what they define as work whatever it is.

Do you think Bill Wyman would rather be touring with the Rolling Stones or trudging across a field with his metal detector? I’ll tell you. He’d rather have his wellies on.

Do you think that Ken Livingstone would rather be trying to win back the GLA or breeding newts? He’d rather be with his little creatures, of course.

What nobody seems to understand is the compromise and the point at which they are paying too much. The cost of earning is time-loss. Every extra hour of work you do means less time to enjoy your life.

Now, lets say you need to feed, clothe and shelter yourself, you could probably do that for £8,000 per year. OK, that doesn’t take account of your dependents who will obviously incur additional needs. So, I reckon a family of four probably costs £16,000 (there are economies of scale and shared services that bring the costs down – it pays to be a family).

You need, therefore, to earn £16k just to survive, and this doesn’t allow you any income in which to enjoy your hobbies. If you just want to spend the rest of the time sitting around and doing nothing, then that’s all you need. If you have expensive hobbies or you want to send your children on school trips then you need to work more.

If you can earn your £16k by working one day a week (about £300) then you have 4 days a week to do nothing – to self-actualise, or be the person you really are.

If you want to earn more in order to indulge your hobbies or to travel then you may need to work an additional day or two.

But why work more than that? Economically it makes no sense because the time you spend working when you don’t need to is surely much more expensive to you than the time you work the other one or two days? That’s time that is not delivering any benefit for you. The income is of no use to you because you don’t need it and you can’t spend it anyway because you’re working.

In other words, the marginal value of each additional hour you work over and above that which funds your lifestyle diminishes rapidly.

Furthermore, there’s a very good argument for taking up cheap hobbies here, because they are actually much better value for money than expensive ones. Walking is virtually free. You could easily live the perfect life on the income of someone without a grain of responsibility as long as your hobby is walking, and you’d be able to do a phenomenal amount of it.

Consider the Cesna pilot, on the other hand. She must work just about every hour she can, and probably in a very stressful job, and for what? So that she can spend a couple of hours a week flying her plane around.


Now, the real trick here, and that which I have dedicated my working life to, is to find the job that pays the most for the least effort, time and responsibility. This would allow me to enjoy expensive hobbies, a luxurious lifestyle and for minimal effort and responsibility.

If someone knows the answer to that one, I’d be interested to hear from you. Meanwhile, just ask yourself if you work too had for your needs.