By Dr. Joseph Barber
The career exploration and job search processes are very
active, fully-conscious experiences. It is important to be intentional,
proactive, and to communicate in very direct ways your career goals to yourself
(yes, sometimes you still need convincing too) and others. Throughout the
process, however, there are some occasions when paying attention to
communication happening at a more subconscious level is also important.
Sometimes you can use this to your advantage, other times, you want to make
sure that it is not putting you at a disadvantage. Here are some examples:
Networking
When you reach out to someone to request an informational
interview (an opportunity to learn form them about their job and experiences
getting to where they are today so that you can use this information as you
possibly apply for similar jobs), there are a handful of reasons why they may
say yes to your request to chat:
- They are an awfully nice person, and love chatting with new people
- They benefited from someone helping them in a similar way in the past, and are happy to pay it forward with you
- They are actually looking for a possible candidate for a role that might match your experiences and interests
- Someone has recommended them to you as a great person to speak with
Points #1-3 are specific to your contact’s needs and
interests – you won’t have any influence here. Point #4 involves an external party,
however, and this begins to create a situation where you can have an impact. In
terms of networking, if I can reach out to a contact and bring in a third party
into my introduction (e.g., Julie says that you will be a good person to reach
out to with my questions), then I am giving my new contact a good reason to respond
to my outreach because they probably don’t want to lose any of the social reputation
that they now feel that they have (albeit at a subconscious level). After all,
if Julie recommends them as a great person to talk with, she can also change
her opinion and feel the opposite if she hears that they don’t actually take
the time to chat to people she recommends. Leveraging this type of subconscious
social pressure by reaching out to people you know so that you can then reach
out to people that they know is an effective networking strategy. This won’t
guarantee that people will respond to you, but it certainly increases the
likelihood that they will.
Resumes
Most of the resumes you send when applying for jobs will first
be “read” by Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) that matches your keywords to
those from the job description to determine whether there is a high enough
match for your application to be passed on to an actual human. For the
time-being, it is likely that these robots are just doing their tasks in an
objective manner without too much of a subconscious to worry about (at least I
hope so!). However, when your resume makes it through to an actual person
(thanks to all of the customizing you did before submitting it), it is time
once again to think about how your language and formatting can affect what they
think about you.
Small fonts and margins, and a lack of any white space in
your resume will make it feel cramped, slightly intimidating, and possibly
overwhelming – not concepts you want associated with you. On the other hand,
resumes with too much spacing between lines, excessive margins, overly large
fonts, all spread out over multiple pages will make it hard for the reader to
picture all of your experiences at once. It will feel as if you are communicating
too slowly and inefficiently.
Your resume will have an experience section. If you call it
“Work Experience”, you may be limiting what you talk about to formal, paid positions.
However, if you call it “Relevant Experience”, then not only do you create a
subconscious signal to the reader that what they are going to being reading is
relevant to them (you still need to make sure it is), but you can also include
experiences that are not purely employment related. For example, you can talk
about your research as a student or postdoc, or an independent project you
worked on with outside collaborators, or the role your played as part of a
student group or club. So long as the experience is relevant to the job you are
applying to, in terms of the skills you are illustrating, then they can be
concentrated together in this one section.
Occasionally, people will create a section in their resume
that is called “Other Experience”. The
term “other” doesn’t leave the reader with much in the way of exciting imagery
to associate with the experience or skills. Indeed, if the writer doesn’t know what these experiences or skills represent,
then the reader is going to have a
much harder time deciphering the value of a section that feels a little like a “stuff”
section.
When it comes to writing bullet points in the resume, a
commonly used phrase to describe experiences is “responsible for…”.
Responsible for coordinating a 300-person professional development event in coordination with 4 local universities
The challenge with this phrasing is that the reader has a
couple of options in terms of what they will take away from this. If they, and their
subconscious, are feeling generally optimistic, then they may feel that you
have successfully taken on lots of responsibility – which is a positive. Alternatively,
if they are feeling more pessimistic, they may note that while you were
responsible for doing this, you didn’t actually state that you did it. Yes, you
were meant to have done it…, but that is not quite the same thing. A more
direct approach that minimizes the ability of the reader to take away
alternatives meanings from the bullet point will be to focus on the actual
skill used, and how successful it is.
Coordinated a 300-person professional development event in collaboration with senior administrators at 4 local universities, bringing in 14 employers and 22 alumni
Overusing verbs such as “helped”, “participated”, and
“worked on” will also create a less tangible image of you in the mind of the
reader, because it is hard to picture exactly what you may have been doing when
you say “worked”. What specific images to these bullets create in your mind?
Worked on key projects that resulted in 20% increase in revenue
Participated in group projects related to research and development
Interviews
Being the most confident version of yourself is a great goal
to have during job interviews. One way to communicate confidence at the
subconscious level is to ensure that you have strong beginnings and strong
endings your answers. This is a common beginning of an answer people give to
questions I pose in mock interviews:
“Ummm…., I think…”
Both of these utterances drain the impact that your answer will
have. Here are some better responses:
“Yes…, I…”
“That’s a great question…, I…”
“I was actually thinking about this question this morning, and I…”
The questions you will ask during an interview are also
important (because you are definitely going to ask some questions, right!?), and
should be framed from an optimistic standpoint. Some students are tempted to
ask a positive/negative question:
“What are some of the best and worst part of this job/employer?”
This might be a question better suited to an informational
interview, rather than a job interview. In a job interview, none of your
interviewers are likely to want to paint the job or their company in a negative
light, and so you wouldn’t get valid information anyway. However, making people
think about the negative aspects of their work life will make them experience a
wave of negative emotional states inside, and your interviewer’s subconscious
might associate you with these negative states since you were the one who
triggered them. As the interviewers gather to discuss the final candidates, any
negative feelings associated with you, even at a subconscious level, are not
going to help your cause.
I have seen advice that asking the “what does an ideal candidate
look like from your perspective?” question at the end of the interview gives you
a last chance to convince the interviewer that you can be that candidate. There
is certainly some truth to this. There is also a risk that by answering the
question out loud, the interviewers create an ideal image in their head that no
longer matches you and your skills and experiences. Asking this question may
undo some of your hard work from the interview, and leave the interviewer
wishing for more – even if they had been happy that you could do the job based
on what you had already answered moments before. They wouldn’t be interviewing
you if they thought you couldn’t do the job. You should spend the interview
providing illustrations of your skills in use so that they can see what value
you bring, and then skip this question.
And asking questions that force your interviewer to do some
of your work for you will also leave them feeling a little deflated about the
experience. For example:
“What questions haven’t I asked that you think it would be important for me to ask?”
The job search process is a great time for you to market the best, most confident version of yourself with dynamic examples, lots of energy, and good dose of optimism. Doing this in the right way will ensure that you are leaving the best impression on the conscious and subconscious of your future employers.
