All Quiet on the Western Affront

It’s not what you’ve done that gets you to an interview; it’s who’s willing to speak on your behalf to the hiring authority. Business Reporter’s resident U.S. ’blogger Keil Hubert grudgingly acknowledges that the data proves the aphorism: personal referrals are by far the most effective technique for finding a new position. This first e-mail that I read this morning was an overly-chipper greeting from a head-hunter looking for a ‘Senior Risk Analyst’ with ‘Cyber Security and GRC experience.’ I skimmed the posting and inquired about the particulars of the role. Who’s the client? What’s the professional growth potential? Why are you hunting for candidates 3,250 kilometres away from the client’s site? I didn’t expect a response, but it seemed discourteous to ignore the invitation. Besides, I was curious about what the head-hunter was actually thinking. The last thing I did before putting the invitation out of my mind entirely was to log the contact in an Excel workbook that I’ve been meticulously updating for the past five years. I first built  a ‘tracker’ tool back in 2012 to help me keep track of my job search activities. I’d been notified that I’d been selected for mandatory military retirement. That means that I’d end my associated civil service role sometime in either 2013 or early 2014. I started applying for outside gigs immediately, assuming that it wouldn’t take long to line up a position that could start a few months after I mustered out. Take some time off as a virtual sabbatical to get a white paper and a book published, then get back to work. I figured that an IT leader with a decade’s experience in a director-equivalent role wouldn’t have any trouble finding a commensurate billet in the local economy. I wouldn’t need to relocate, and could choose the best offer out of several. I was dead wrong. I learned the same lesson that most former-squaddies and public sector workers learn when transitioning back to the private sector: a grunt’s contributions to the greater good are always appreciated …. in the abstract. They’re almost useless in getting one’s boot in the door.

I know. In retrospect, it was bloody stupid to combine those two categories. In my defence I’d never dealt with the sort of fly-by-night head-hunters that saturate the market. From the hiring side, I’d only ever worked with professionals. That’s why it took me so long to recognize the obvious pattern in the data – the useless head-hunters were masking the truth. 

I added each of those columns to show the grand total of job attempts I’d made to-date. After my first week of note taking, I added three additional rows: rejection notification, interviews conducted, and offers made. I totalled each of those rows as well, making a handy little table. My boss liked it because we could see strong daily progress. We were both encouraged … at first. When I left that office four months later, I copied my informal table down in my notebook and took it with me. In my notes section, I’d kept a running change log for each day (e.g., ‘Apps, 24^th April, +6 Private [Direct]’ and ‘Reject, 11^th September, +1 Public [Federal]’). I’d made a new version of the table every time I ran out of space on a page from per-day log entries. By the end of my 18-month job search process, my logbook table looked like this:

	Public Sector (Federal)	Public Sector (Other)	Private Sector (Direct)	Private Sector (Referral)	Total
Applications	70	13	335	86	504
Rejections	52	6	138	22	218
Interviews	0	3	19	18	40
Offer	0	0	0	1	1

Table 1. Raw job search data from my trusty notebook The day that I in-processed the new company, I took a long, thoughtful look at the data that I’d amassed and drew some conclusions from the experience. The raw numbers told me several very interesting stories that convinced me to completely change my approach to future job search work.

That is to say valuable, infuriating, and depressing all at the same time. Let’s try and focus on the ‘valuable’ parts right now.

Some of the revelations from my expanded workbook included these curious factoids:

• I learned that federal agencies are far more likely to tell you that they don’t want you. Federal jobs had a staggering 74% response rate. That’s much better than the rest of public sector (46% response), direct private sector applications (41%), and insider referrals (26%).
• Within the Federal space, feedback varied wildly between agencies. Agencies like the FBI and the VA had a 100% response rate. Most other agencies hovered around 75-80%. Some never replied at all. Once an agency went zero responses for two or more applications in 12 months, I wrote that agency off as not being worth applying to.
• In contrast, private sector roles (when they responded at all) replied much faster than federal agencies did, sometimes on the same day that I’d applied. If a company was on the ball, they’d respond with either a rejection, an interview request, or a request for further information within 45 days; after that, the odds of ever hearing from them again dropped to zero.

It was analysis like this that reinforced my belief that evidence is more valuable to the job seeker than technique. As the experts had recommended, I made dozens of résumés, CVs, and cover letters – but I gave each one a unique tracking number so that I could evaluate the relative effectiveness of the design type, version, and variations used. I learned over time which keywords were most likely to ‘trip’ an Applicant Management System into sorting me into the ‘qualified’ bin. That helped too, but not nearly as much as learning where to apply. Some companies were simply black holes: I made a list of businesses that would never react to an application and stopped bothering with them. I only managed to secure 40 interviews over 80 weeks, or about 0.5 interviews per week. Bear in mind that these weren’t interviews with 40 different companies; rather, the count represented discrete encounters with company reps. One company put me through nine separate interviews for a role that they’d never considered me to be qualified for. Most were a complete waste of my time.

Many green managers erroneously believe that the ‘best’ candidate for a position is one that’s only ever performed the exact same role in the exact same industry segment as the last person to hold the position. Seasoned leaders, on the other hand, recognize the competitive value of candidates who bring synergistic skills and experiences to the table. 

With those experiences firmly in mind, I greatly increased my efforts to help others network effectively. Now, when I meet or work with someone that I’d be willing to hire myself, I do whatever I can to help them. I help people polish their CVs, robust their LinkedIn profiles, improve on their interviewing skills, and optimize their searches. I also take every opportunity to recommend the qualified candidates in my business and social networks to anyone that I know may be hiring. Rather than wait to be asked for a favour, I seek out opportunities to endorse good people for new roles. I strive to do everything that I can to help decent people ‘beat’ a job-hunting system that seems to be wilfully rigged against them. I don’t want anyone else to have to waste their time logging hundreds of pointless applications only to have nothing to show for it. I should have recognized the important of this pre-emptive approach much sooner. One of the core values that they teach you as a young squaddie is to never leave a brother behind. The principle applies just as much in the job market as it does on the battlefield. In both environments, the most effective way to help your buddy keep up with the group is to look around for who among you is faltering, and offer them aid before they ask for it. The team either makes it to friendly lines together or else it doesn’t make it at all.

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[1] In US federal service, you can ‘buy back’ your active duty military time to make it count towards your civil service retirement. It’s pricey, but worth it … if you can then make it to the required 25 years of service to qualify for a full pension. [2] I published four columns on this topic this time last year that I urge you consider: Squaddie’s Choice, The Tommy-Knockers, Ranger in a Strange Land, and An Abridge Too Far. Title Allusion: Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front; 1929 book)

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POC is Keil Hubert, keil.hubert@gmail.com Follow him on Twitter at @keilhubert. You can buy his books on IT leadership, IT interviewing, horrible bosses and understanding workplace culture at the Amazon Kindle Store. Keil Hubert is a retired U.S. Air Force ‘Cyberspace Operations’ officer, with over ten years of military command experience. He currently consults on business, security and technology issues in Texas. He’s built dot-com start-ups for KPMG Consulting, created an in-house consulting practice for Yahoo!, and helped to launch four small businesses (including his own). Keil’s experience creating and leading IT teams in the defense, healthcare, media, government and non-profit sectors has afforded him an eclectic perspective on the integration of business needs, technical services and creative employee development… This serves him well as Business Technology’s resident U.S. blogger.