With many chasing few jobs, misstep can blow offer

Tamara Rashid is a recruiter for Renton-based Zones, which sells technical equipment to businesses. She recently received 400 résumés for one position.

Joseph Hill is trying to look like a salesman.

His lanky frame is draped in a gray suit, a gift from his father along with the shiny black shoes. But his unruly hair and goatee give him away. This guy’s a young techie, bruised by the recession and eager for something that will pay the bills.

By Shirleen Holt
Seattle Times business reporter
BETTY UDESEN / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Today he’s interviewing at Zones, a Renton company that sells computer systems to businesses.

What three words describe you, recruiter Tamara Rashid asks.

"Fast-learning, good customer service, punctuality."

Why do you want to work for Zones?

"I’ve been trying to find a job that I can settle down in."

Bzzzzz. Wrong answer.

These days it’s not what the company can do for the candidate, it’s what the candidate can do for the company.

Job interviews always have been pocked with landmines, but rarely have the consequences been so harsh. Today a single misstep can mean another agonizing stretch of unemployment, another round of résumé mailing, and more weeks of waiting for the phone to ring.

More than 213,000 people in Washington state are competing for 55,700 fewer jobs than last year. Recruiters who were scraping the bottom of the labor pool just two years ago now look at hundreds of applications for every opening they post.

Flaws that were once tolerated — limited experience, perhaps, or a history of job hopping — are now causes for rejection. Even people with seemingly perfect credentials are vulnerable.

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"For salespeople, it’s not enough to have hit your numbers during the good times," said Jill Maguire-Ward, human-resources chief for Onyx Software in Bellevue, a local technology company that actually is hiring.

"We’re now looking for people who have hit their numbers during the last year, when it’s been difficult."

And Onyx doesn’t have to look far. It receives about 200 job e-mail messages within a few days of posting a position on its Web site.

Such competition is leading many job seekers to wonder what it takes to find work these days.

800 résumés, one job

Julie Johnson scrolls … and scrolls through the message headers in her e-mail inbox.

The recruiting specialist for Seattle Coffee counts more than 400 responses to a posting on the company’s Web site for a retail-marketing manager. This is only a partial list; there are at least 400 others coming through e-mail, faxes and traditional mail.

Johnson will open them all, even though few will relate to the coffee business or the job that was advertised.

It’s job-search spam — people sending out résumés en masse in hopes the sheer volume will render a hit. It’s gotten worse in the past few months, Johnson said. In some cases, the senders have even forgotten to change the cover letter, which says how interested they are in working for Starbucks.

Of this batch of about 800, only 35 will make it to the second stage, a phone interview. Of those, 10 will be called for a face-to-face interview with Johnson. About five finalists will go on to meet with corporate managers.

Although it’s common for companies to post job openings on their Web sites and in newspaper classifieds, the odds of landing a job that way are slim, ranging from about 8 percent from help-wanted ads to 16 percent for Internet job boards and company Web sites, according to Spherion, a Florida outplacement firm that tracks employment trends.

In today’s job market, it’s what you know and who you know.

More than half of the nation’s job seekers find work through connections, Spherion found.

At Seattle Coffee, Johnson estimates at least a third of the people hired come through referrals.

A connection doesn’t guarantee a job if a stranger’s résumé is stronger, but it’ll always get extra attention, recruiters say.

In the interview

Halfway into the interview, Hill begins to relax. At 22, he’s got enough retail experience to qualify as a salesman.

He worked at two computer stores, helping customers shop for systems and making sure they got their orders. Laid off from the Computer Stop’s Bellevue store in July, he gave permission for The Seattle Times to observe his first interview at Zones.

Rashid asks him to recount a time he’d solved a problem on the job.

He’s stumped for a minute.

"One time a customer ordered a part, and it didn’t arrive on time. It was hard to find, and the customer really needed it. I found one on eBay and had it shipped overnight."

Bingo.

Rashid smiles and makes a note.

Candidates who blow interviews tend to falter in two general areas, recruiters say. They haven’t done their homework on the company, or it’s clear they wouldn’t fit in with the culture.

Onyx Software takes pride in its team-oriented values, but it got burned during the boom years when talent was scarce.

It hired some "stars" — accomplished people who didn’t show up for meetings, refused to listen to co-workers or took credit for other people’s projects. Many of those employees are gone.

"Not sticking to your hiring standards will cost you more in the end," said Maguire-Ward. "But I don’t know of any employer that didn’t get stuck."

At WRQ, a large Seattle software company named one of the 100 best companies to work for by Fortune magazine, some candidates arrive for the interview without a clue about what the company does.

This irritates Debbie DeGabrielle, vice president of marketing, who sees the applicants after they’ve gone through a few layers of screening.

"I wanted to say ‘Why on earth would we hire you if you’ve not taken the time to find out about this company?’ "

Aggressive and desperate

With the competition so stiff, job seekers are getting more aggressive, prompting syndicated writer Dale Dauten to label them "stalkers with résumés."

Some call recruiters daily; others show up for unscheduled visits. One Zones hopeful tried to bluff his way into a meeting with Rashid, telling the receptionist he had an appointment. His ploy backfired. "It was pretty rude," she said.

Viegele at Law Dawgs, a Seattle-based legal-employment agency, said job seekers are increasingly desperate.

She’s heard some candidates burst into tears when she called with bad news; others have angrily shouted at her. More than once, a candidate has been obviously drunk, prompting the person’s résumé to go straight to the company’s "red file," a résumé graveyard.

DeGabrielle of WRQ thinks the constant rejection and pressures of the job market are taking their toll on otherwise well-adjusted people.

She sees the same "confidence crisis" in today’s applicants that she saw when she taught a community-college class for widows.

"They had no confidence that someone would want to hire them. Many of the people we’re seeing now don’t have confidence that we’re going to be interested in them. That hurts them enormously in an interview," DeGabrielle said.

Recruiters stretched thin

With their own responsibilities stretched by budget cutbacks, many recruiters have twice as much work and half the resources they had when the economy was booming. Johnson, of Seattle Coffee, lost the screener that helped her handle the daily résumé pile.

Today, the average time it takes the company to review résumés, screen candidates and conduct in-person interviews could be as long as two months.

Hill, who claims labor activist Joe Hill as a distant relative, is in a better position than many job seekers.

Sales is still considered a high-growth industry, with more than 4,000 current openings statewide and an additional 545 jobs expected to be added this year.

After layoffs and a hiring freeze that ended in October, Zones has hired 140 people in the past year.

Competition for a single sales position is about 20-to-1, tough odds but better than those in other fields.

It helps that Hill has a friend at Zones who knows Rashid. He made it over the first two hurdles, the résumé and the phone screen, another way Rashid narrows the competition. Those who look good on paper may not have the phone "presence," as she calls it, to make sales, most of which are phone-based.

Indeed, one promising candidate — who talked softly — got cut because he was virtually impossible to hear over the phone.

Hill easily passed that test and he’s passing this one, too. He doesn’t know it, but Rashid is already sold on him. Zones, it turns out, doesn’t want seasoned salespeople.

"We want to mold people," she said later.

In the end, his qualifications didn’t help Hill. Nor did the fact the company’s hiring manager was rooting for him.

Two days after an especially tough interview with the sales team, Hill got a letter telling him he didn’t get the job.

He got nervous in that interview, he explained. He choked.

"I’m going to try to find another job. Beyond that I’m not sure," he said, his voice heavy.

"What’s important is that I tried and I gave it my best."

Shirleen Holt: 206-464-8316 or [email protected].

Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company

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