October 2004 - Rowan Manahan, Fortify Services

Rowan Manahan, MD of Fortify Services and author of Where's My Oasis? talks to us about the 21st century selection process, the mindset you need in order to succeed and the slip-ups, gaffes and clangers that he sees people making in today's selection interviews

Describe what you do ...
In a nutshell, career management. We serve as a sounding board for our clients - whether it be a job-hunter who just isn't quite making it, a CEO who is rehearsing a vital presentation and wants the unvarnished truth in feedback, or someone who is newly-appointed to a position and wants to talk about a problem they are having without revealing that concern to anyone working for their employer.

Exactly what is Career Management?
Sometimes it is easier to describe something in terms of what it is not. If you are not actively managing or driving your career in this day and age, it will stagnate and can leave you in a dreadfully vulnerable position. This is known as 'Career Management Deficiency' and it is a very common and dangerous disease. If you are not particularly happy in your job, but you are just firing off a stock CV every now and then in response to ads in the papers and desultorily calling one or two placement agencies every few months, you are operating at the bottom of the food chain. Full-on career management requires professionalism, total commitment and large reserves of enthusiasm and energy every step of the way.

This is not an innate talent; you have to learn how. Nor is it a frivolous luxury; it is fast becoming a necessity. Nor is it a one-off investment of time, effort or money; the skills and strategies we teach become part of our clients' daily routines. You brush your teeth every day so they don't look, feel and smell unattractive and so that they don't fall out of your head. For the majority of people, their career is their sole revenue stream. Do you think that yours could benefit from a more-than-occasional polish and flossing?

Career management is, at its most fundamental level, all about survival in these increasingly uncertain times. It is about carefully building and nurturing your skills and your reputation. Let's take a typical, happy life as a starting point: happy home, happy relationship, maybe some kids, and a good job to top it off. Most people can describe the bulk of their lives in these terms. And yet, look at the burgeoning stress levels out there.

The biggest selling drugs in the world? All about stress: Anti-depressants, Anti-hypertensives, Ulcer medications, Cholesterol regulating agents, Impotence drugs! Life is stressful enough, and you will almost certainly not float through it without having to face and survive a bunch of crises. Elderly relatives will die. Children will have accidents or horrendous illnesses. Friends and colleagues will stab you in the back. Businesses you are involved in will fail. You will lose jobs or make poor career choices. You will have debts. You will crash cars. Lumps will fall off your house. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. There's a whole lot of stuff in your life over which you have little or no control. My point is this: if you have control in a situation, any control, identify it and USE IT. At Fortify, we are all about strategic, objective thinking; unearthing and bolstering our clients' strengths over time and providing them with uncomplicated, workable solutions to the problems they face in their working lives, whether that be as part of the job or as part of a job-hunt.

Why do you think this concept of career management has expanded so much in recent years?
Simple economics - people recognise need for it and either don't have the time or the skills to do it for themselves, so an industry springs up to satisfy that need. I suppose what has surprised me is how slowly the idea of actively managing and planning your career has grown. The job-for-life concept became an endangered species in the 1970s and was declared formally extinct in the 1990s. People just weren't ready to accept that.

I still hear denial-speak all the time: “Oh, it's not really that bad out there, and I'm doing a good job - they'd be fools to let me go.” But talk to anyone who has been through an enforced job move as a result of a merger, acquisition, restructuring, downsizing, profit call or whatever. When reality hits you in the face like that, you start to realise the value of these career skills. And until these kind of survival life-skills are put on the school and college curricula, there is going to be a need for experts in this field.

Career management is a pain and a nuisance. You simply should not have to work this hard just to stay afloat - but you do. You do because of the lack of certainty that seems to be the norm in the marketplace now and you do because your competition is getting smarter and slicker with their approach to job-hunting. You can play the denial game, you can play the bargaining/fantasy game. It's your livelihood, so feel free. If, however, you do accept the realities of the marketplace you can either choose to regard the effort involved in managing your career as a pain in the neck or you can regard it as an investment.

Look at it this way: in many cases, the effort involved in finding, researching and securing a job is more challenging and time-consuming than performance of the job itself and only you can decide how much effort to put into staying on top of your career or any job-hunt and how much exertion that job is worth to you. But I have always felt that it is better to be a little over-prepared and not need it than to be under-prepared and suddenly find yourself tongue-tied in the midst of a vital interview. (Just look at how much prep Bush and Kerry have put into getting themselves ready for the debates.)

If you have an opportunity coming up and you will have your chance at interview - what's the five-year return on investment? €150,000? €200,000? €300,000? I contend that an ongoing tickover effort to keep your career on track, with a few bursts of heavy activity when you are considering a move, doesn't sound so bad when you put it in the light of that kind of return for the effort involved.

I have heard you describe career management as common sense. Is it really that simple? What is the core message you advocate?
Our core message is that career management really is simple - it's just not easy. The issue for someone who is not succeeding with any consistency in job-hunts is rarely something that requires brain surgery. The problem is that people don't talk about this subject - if you are instinctively good at job-hunting you're not going to talk about HOW you do it, because you don't want to give away your competitive edge. And if you are lousy at it, you're not going to want to talk about your cringeworthy mistakes with your friends in the pub, now are you? People just don't talk about this stuff, but it's not rocket science.

For the most part, the clients I meet are missing a few elements in the mix, usually nothing too drastic; but they don't have the time or inclination to work out the optimal approach for themselves. We all have busy lives … So in exactly the same way as you seek specialist help when you need to highlight your hair, repair your car or tend to a sick pet, people come to Fortify to get some pointers. And when we indicate where they are underperforming and provide them with a structured framework with which to approach the market, they rarely see it as a bolt from the blue - it's just good, sound advice built on the experience we have gained working with thousands of job-hunters over the years.

Who is your book aimed at? You cover factors like stress, contract negotiation and making presentations in the book; is it pitched only at executive level?
Not at all, Where's My Oasis will be useful to anyone undertaking a 21st century job-hunt. I just haven't gone for a lowest-common-denominator approach because, in today's market, operating at that level will get you precisely nowhere. To be fair, the book is probably not going to be of great value to someone leaving secondary school and looking for their first job, but anyone who has even a modicum of experience (College summer jobs or upwards) will find Oasis useful to bring focus and clarity to their job-hunt. For someone who is a few rungs up the ladder, there's plenty to think about – the book is interspersed with numerous exercises – and the concepts of career management (rather than simple job-hunting) will probably resonate more with this audience.

Like any good self-help book, Oasis isn't designed or intended to be read from cover to cover. (I can't imagine anyone reviewing it and describing it as “a real page-turner.”) So we've made sure that it is very well indexed and is comprehensively cross-referenced throughout. For one type of reader, it may be a question of dipping into it to work out an answer to a particular thorny question while someone else may want to drastically overhaul their approach to job-hunting and will need to read most of the book.

Tell us about the sort of people you have helped
The graduate who thought he was pretty damn special and couldn't understand why no one else thought so too. The middle manager who used to need beta-blockers and valium to get through a presentation. The mother coming back to the workforce who didn't realise that she had exactly the kind of values that the market is looking for now. The CEO who was curled up in the foetal position on the couch in my office having lost his job in a hostile takeover.

I'm lucky - a lot of the work I do pays dividends quickly for my clients and I get to enjoy, and be a part of, their success, their victories large and small, their new-found confidence. I'm even more fortunate in that I have relationships with clients spanning many years and vicariously get to be part of their world over a protracted period.

In what way have you seen the jobs market changing?
Oh God! How long have you got? The pace of change has been so rapid. Some of the bigger issues would include a definite shift back to employers ‘driving' the recruitment business, ever-increasing insecurity in the corporate world, a progressively more litigious Generation-X workforce, and an overall uplift in the level of professionalism required to succeed in the modern selection process. Now I'm sure every generation since the caves has said that it's tougher out there than it used to be, but the level of competition for a plum job now is just savage!

It's the oldest cliché in the book - you really do have to work smarter than your competition. Sorry, but it's so true … With information as freely available as it is now, you are expected to be VERY well versed in the state of play in your market, your competitive environment and what's coming down the pike in your sector. Five to ten years ago, only the most senior players would be asked questions of this nature, now this kind of stuff is coming up at milk-round interviews for College graduates. This is why I harp on so much about the concept of career management; if you are not operating to a plan and your competition is, in all likelihood, you are not going to prevail in your job-hunts and you may see your career topping out.

Sun Tzu said it, in the fifth century BC: “In order to go into battle unafraid you must know yourself, know the terrain and know the enemy.” Apply that sort of thinking to the last interview you attended - did you really examine yourself to determine your core areas of competence and prepare and rehearse to speak effectively about them? Did you have a clear understanding of the sector, the organisation and the role? Did you know what the job really entailed and how it fit into the organisation chart? Were you familiar and comfortable with the organisation's culture and were you a good match for that organisation? Were you genuinely excited about the prospect of getting this job? Five years ago, when I asked questions like these in seminars, people looked at me as though I had a second head growing out of my shoulders. Today they don't - because these questions are the emerging reality of the market.

And how is all that affecting the way in which interviews are conducted today?
With very few exceptions, the screening and selection process is taking longer now than it has even in the recent past. People-purchasing decisions are very rarely taken in haste. In the bad old days, you would undergo a biographical style interview with your line manager, get rubber-stamped by HR and, as long as you didn't have glaringly obvious skeletons in your closet, that was it, welcome aboard. The problem was that studies showed up to a 70% bad-hire / wrong-hire rate using that approach. Then there came the period where knowledge was everything. “We'll hire the brightest, best-qualified, most experienced candidate and then mould him/her into our way of working” A manifestly ludicrous concept when you boil it down like that. Can you imagine marrying someone on that basis? “Well, I'm sure I can change him/her ...”

So now, for a middle-ranking position and upwards, you can expect to have to jump through a significant number of hoops. Screening interview(s) with HR; multiple meetings with different members of the management team; perhaps a platform test - where they check the quality of your thinking and your ability to work under pressure. Psychometric profiling is very much on the increase too. To maximise your chances of success in the face of all of that, you really need to know your stuff.

In the face of that level of scrutiny, my advice is:

You have a lot of control at certain points in the selection process (most people don't realise this) and, in those moments when you have it, you must learn to bring that control fully to bear.

What about the big faux pas? What are the common mistakes you see when you are interviewing candidates?
I am consistently amazed at the simple, simple mistakes that candidates make in the interview room. An interview can turn on a word, particularly if you are competing for a hotly-contested position, with a pool of applicants broadly similar to yourself. When I am hiring on behalf of a corporate, it is obvious to me that a lot of people forget this simple fact.

The most common mistake that I see is simple under-preparedness. Candidates do not conduct adequate research into the sector, the organisation or the role they are applying for. Worse yet, they don't really distinguish what it is that they have to offer. If YOU don't know who you are, what makes you tick and what makes you different, special, remarkable - how can you expect the interviewers to discover these things? You have to do the work for them. Hollywood invented the concept of the 'Elevator Sales Pitch' - where you meet the senior Studio Executive in the lift and pitch your movie concept to him/her in 60 seconds. Can you do the equivalent for your life? For the work you have done in your most recent job? For the most significant contribution you have made in that job?

The other big problem that I encounter regularly is the skilful candidate with a strong track record who just can't (or won't) take due credit for their accomplishments. An interview is not the place for a self-effacing delivery. You need to get comfortable with what I call the 'Vocabulary of Self Promotion' - that kind of confident (bordering on brash, you really walk a tightrope here) delivery that is a combination of reassurance and sales-pitch. For most people, that vocabulary is as alien as Shakespearian English. You have no occasion to speak this way about yourself in any setting other than a professional interview, so you need to dredge up that vocabulary and get it flowing in a credible way.

As I said, overcoming these problems is not exactly rocket science, but hopefully the book will kick-start the thinking process for most people, so they can avoid these potholes.

Find out more about Rowan's firm here and his book here.
Where's My Oasis? is available from all good bookshops and online from Easons and Amazon.

original article here