The Job Search Solution
The Perspective of the HR Department Part I
Dave Perry Interview with Dave Perry: Dave discusses things you need to know about the HR department.
Welcome. This podcast is sponsored by the jobsearchsolution.com. America's only 60-hour program of everything you could possibly imagine about how to find a job. The jobsearchsolution.com has successfully helped more than 100,000 people find a job as fast as possible. The jobsearchsolution.com. Welcome back, and as we do every Tuesday, we'd like to welcome Dave Perry. Dave is our resident retained search recruiter at out of Ottawa, Canada. He's been in a retained search business for 35 years. He's published nine books on how to find a job and how to hire as a tremendous program out in the world that he's going to tell us about when we begin our second session. He comes to us every Tuesday evening talking about different aspects of the recruiting world and sees me he's going to talk to us about, let's see, what we're all about, HR perspective, the HR department. Boy, that's going to be a real trick because most candidates and most even hiring authorities don't really know the perspective of HR, do they, Dave? Well, actually that's what I was thinking, and that's part of the challenge for job hunters, and you know, before I jump down HR's throat, let me put it in perspective, people in HR do not necessarily have any background in the functions that they're going to be recruiting. That's just the fact. I mean, it should be no surprise if you're the head of HR, even if you're a recruiter inside an HR group. You can't be expected to have experience in sales, marketing, finance, engineering, operations, research to the degree to which the candidates are trying to recruit or assess are going to have, and that's just reality, and at the same time, HR is high risk, and what I mean by that is, I always say, HR stands for Tiring Resistance, and let me explain that. Every time a recruiter or HR manager interviews with someone, they put their reputation, and really, honestly, their job, on the line, because they have to make an assessment about your suitability to work at that organization. So the way that most of them do it is, on paper, and that's why you're there for the interview, on paper, do you meet the functional technical specs for the role? They're going to get that, for the most part, out of reading your resume, your cover letter, and your LinkedIn profile. So if you're in an interview, you probably already passed the litmus test for, you got the skills. So what's the big deal? Well, the big deal is, HR really needs to assess. They have to feel you out, to assess whether or not you fit with their culture, however they find their culture. That's what the interview is going to really be around. So answer all the questions about the technical specs and all that kind of stuff, and then do yourself a favor early in the process, and that is become interactive. You know, I always say, and 20 agrees, people hire you for one of three reasons, make money, save money, increase efficiency. That's the hiring manager. HR manager, the recruiter hire you with the idea of, are they going to fit with the rest of the team? Are they going to be easy to manage, or am I hiring a handful? And being a handful is not necessarily a negative, but they're going to think about this. If you look like you're going to be a prima donna and hard to manage, you're not doing yourself any favor, because that first screen, which is probably what HR and recruiting are, are going to screen you out because you potentially become a burden on them down. What do you think, Tony? I definitely, they, I've often seen them, and I have some very good friends that are in the HR arena, and I have a lot of respect for them, and they have a very tough job. When you're a job seeker, you think that their only job is to move the hiring process and focus on you. They have a lot more responsibilities doing many other things. When it comes to hiring, I've often seen them as hiring roadblocks, mainly because they're looking for as many reasons not to hire you, as to hire you, because they're always looking for reasons of why they shouldn't, because on down the road, they're going to maybe put up with some problems. Dave and I have been around long enough to know what how the HR department came about, and it really wasn't anywhere near what it's like now in the '40s and the '50s, and it came about in the '60s. It started generating itself to help in the hiring of making sure hiring was fair, and right, and just, and all of that. When the process of doing that, the hiring authorities, people that really do the hiring that are managing companies, heaped up a whole bunch of other stuff on it. If you know what the heck, if they're doing that, they might as well do this, and they might as well screen all these people, because we hate doing it, and we don't like interviewing, so we'll dump it all on them. Then if things don't go right, we can blame them. Then they gave HR all of these things that they really shouldn't be doing, like hiring some of your best employees, because they don't really know what goes on in the accounting department. They don't really know what goes on in the engineering department. They're not an engineer. They're not a chemist. They're not a biophysicist. They are not any of those things, and they really don't know what they're talking about when it comes to that. It becomes extremely convoluted, but they get stuck with these jobs, because nobody else really wants to do it. Therefore, they wind up being in the seat of protecting the company when it shouldn't have anything to do with that. With that, we have to protect our time, take a short break, stay tuned. This is Tony Beshear, along with a period of job search solution. This podcast was sponsored by TheJobSearchSolutions.com. It's the world's most successful online job search program. My expert in Metrench's advice has been used by more than 100,000 people to successfully find a new job. Go to TheJobSearchSolutions.com and start today toward a better job.