You answered the questions flawlessly. Your suit was picture perfect. Everyone seemed to like you. You didn’t get the job.

Your friend in the company said that you were not organized enough to fit their culture and you are figuring out how on earth they came to that conclusion.

“Dude” your friend says “They went into the parking lot and looked in your car!”

You walk out with a new perspective and gaze into the window of your ‘94 Nissan Altima. Your back seat has three empty bags from McDonalds, assorted piles of indescribable papers, a 2002 copy of the yellow pages, gym shorts in need of cleaning, a player’s guide to Warcraft and a condom wrapper (empty). The company made the right choice. Not because it’s a ‘94 Nissan. Heck, that tells me you don’t have a car payment and you are not highly motivated to be materialistic. Which for some jobs that speaks perfection. Your backseat is a catalog of probably what your home looks like, your organizational mindset, your work habits, and how you treat your personal belongings. This tells me how your office will look, what your work standards are, and how you will treat company equipment.

Checking the condition of your car is just one of the tricks I would have my recruiting teams use to make sure that who you were in the interview room was the same person we would be working with six months into the job. Although I constantly get calls and letters from listeners to my show (jobcastradio.com) telling me that the job they have is nothing close to the job they applied to, I get twice as many stories of people who were great in an interview and a nightmare in the office. Remember, your interview is nothing short of a blind first date. In fact it’s even worse. Consider this:

 

 

 

• You put up a personal add seeking a spouse.
   
• A casual friend checks out the responses and finds someone that you might like.
   
• You have one phone call lasting about an hour.
   
• You have one date that lasts about the length of a Pixar movie. (and is about as polite)
   
• You have them meet the family for about an hour each. (Mom, Dad, 2 Brothers, and an Uncle)
   
• They all seem to like this person.
   
• Do you get married? (If you said yes, stop reading… you are beyond hope)  

This is what it is like to be a hiring manager. Only not only do they “marry” the candidate, they immediately start paying alimony. So companies are getting very strategic and extremely creative in finding ways to penetrate the formality of the interview process and learn about who you are. I am not suggesting that you hide who you are, and honestly most companies are not assuming you are a closet nut job desperate to find a way to fake a worker’s compensation claim. You both have the same goal of finding out if you will work well together. So know the secrets. The easy ones you should already know about. Companies will:
 

• Check out your Facebook, MySpace, Linked-in, profiles. They will look at your friends (if your dumb enough to give them access to that information) your associates, your photos (especially those tagged “too drunk to remember this party”) your posts, your links and anything else that they can use to identify what you are like when you are not in the interview room.
   
• Check out to see if you have profiles on dating sites, a personal blog, comments and posts on other sites. It is not entirely ethical to kill your job hopes over your position on protecting big foot habitats but I have seen it happen.
   
• We will watch your body language when we have the cute HR representative walk into the interview to hand us an empty folder. We will leave a ten dollar bill in the interview room to see if you take it, turn it in, or ignore it.
   
• AND We will take you to lunch! Forget the story of the person who did not get the job because he put pepper (or salt) on this meal before tasting it. But what you order, how you eat, when you cross over from interview mode to “relaxed banter”, and what you say in the car drive back are all under the microscope. So avoid sauces, eat light, don’t slouch, don’t talk with your mouth full, share the conversation time and wash your hands.
   

I tell you these things because you need to know them and because you need to be equally as crafty in examining the messages your future company job is unknowingly sending to you. What are those messages and how do you find them? That is next week’s article.

The moral to the story is “be who you are and find where you fit in” and you will never have to act your way into a job. Yet remember that you too are also on a date and visiting the family. You have been invited into someone else’s home. If they like you, they will invite you into the family and this family comes with medical, vacation, and maybe even a 50% 401(k) match.

Copyright © 2010 Mike Baumgartner | HR | Consulting | Coach |  Human Resources | Search - CEO, Worklife Survival Center LLC