How to Get Hired
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[00:00:00] I recently asked job seekers what they wanted to know about the hiring process, what inside scoop they wanted from recruiters. And they gave me a list of things, but one of the things that became really clear is they actually didn't know what the full hiring process was. And what I thought might be useful is to just tell people how to get hired.
So the end to end recruiting process explained, and that's what we're going to do today. Now I'm going to share a file for most of this. I actually just have a screen up for most of this with a process flow that you can follow. I'm offering that for free. You can download that just go to execcongress.
com slash hired and you'll be able to download the file here and just have your own visual to review if you're not taking notes or something. So execcongress. com slash hired. As background, my name is Jason Roberts. If this is the first time that you've seen me I've been a recruiter for 25 years, I'm spending a [00:01:00] little bit of time.
Just sharing some of the information that I have on how to how to find your next job, how to find a better thing in, in your role. Let's start through this process and I'll bring it up here.
To start with is of course submitting your resume now you can find places to submit resumes all over the place you have a few different options on that and i'll do a separate video on where to submit a resume But of course job boards things like indeed linkedin are the two primaries, I would say.
Indeed, LinkedIn, Zip Recruiter is is very, is right there along with those, that, that group. And then there's some classics, some oldies but goodies like Monster and Career Builder and a few really niche y boards like E Finance, Financial Careers, things like that. Different geographies have different boards that are really...
Good for them. So places like Nore, India and StepStone throughout Europe. Just just keep an eye out for the right places. But the place where you can always submit, probably the better place to submit is directly to the company's career [00:02:00] site, and that's where you want to go. More often than not, you wanna submit direct to that company's career side.
So the next step is the recruiter screen. Now, as soon as. You submit your resume, it goes into the company's applicant tracking system. If it's a company of any size, they have an applicant tracking system of some sort. It's going to go into that ATS and there, you might get sorted based on keywords.
And I've recorded another video that you can check out here that is about how to amplify your resume and get it seen, but it'll be sorted based on how good of a match you are to the job description and then a recruiter seat. That's where our next step comes in, the recruiter screen. The recruiter will take a look at your resume in comparison to the job description itself and they'll form a number of questions.
And they'll reach out to you, they may just call you directly, but oftentimes they'll send you an invite to self schedule an interview they'll ask you some questions about, gaps in employment questions to help narrow down the [00:03:00] number of years of experience you have in really key pieces of the job description.
What they're trying to do is gather the information they need to say, is this person qualified enough for me to say they're a good fit and hand you off to the hiring manager. They'll ultimately only hand off three, maybe five, candidates to a hiring manager before they say, I'm done for now, and they wait for the hiring manager's feedback on those candidates.
Now, managers will get your resume, they'll take a look and they will schedule a hiring manager screen. The hiring manager really knows a lot more. Remember, the recruiter doesn't know exactly what you do.
They know enough to be dangerous. They know enough to know keywords, but they don't know exactly what the day-to-day work is. Like the hiring manager who will ultimately oversee you does so for example, a technical recruiter. You may know how to say the word Java, but they don't know how to code Java by any stretch.
And they typically don't know how to ask really good questions to discern whether you are a good Java developer. The hiring manager [00:04:00] will. And that's what they spend their time on. It's usually a functional capability screen. They may actually put a technical screen before this for technology jobs.
But typically you'll go into the hiring manager screen as a next step. The hiring manager will say, right on, here are my. Three people that I want to go into team interviews If they don't have three people the last a recruiter to go get more Usually they want three people to interview those people go into interviews you now you've gone from One amongst hundreds of people who submitted you've gone through a recruiter screen So you're you may have been one of a couple of dozen who went through that you're the hiring manager screen You're probably top three, maybe five, and things are getting serious.
You've got a chance here. And the deeper you get into the process the higher your likelihood of getting this role. You get into team interviews next. These team interviews can be peers, future peers on the team deep [00:05:00] diving on your ability to do the job day to day.
They know they're doing similar jobs, so they'll deep dive on that. It can be peers of the hiring manager if you're in a highly collaborative job. That hiring manager may have a number of people that they know you're going to have to work with and collaborate with. It might be peers of those individuals.
If you're going for a management job, it might be people who ultimately will report to you. So your your direct reports may even interview you. That's what the team interviews can be. It could be any number of interviews. The worst I ever saw was something like 12. I thought that was a little obnoxious.
But the norm on these is somewhere around two or three team interviews. Expect some team interviews. Expect to talk to some people who will have a a stake in your success. You want a number of them just to, just for the people that when you land. To who you interact with to have a little bit of skin in the game.
So you do, it's not a terrible thing. It just tends to drag the process out. Now, the next step is something that I [00:06:00] call the finalist interview. Usually there's, if you get down to the last person, it might be that the hiring manager comes back to you and is starting to fill you out on exactly how you would land in the job.
There might be one or two of you left. They'll do the tiebreaker interview. At this point and then they'll send you to this finalist and the finalist interview is where the hiring manager's boss, sometimes not my hiring manager, but usually the hiring manager's boss will say, hi, nice to meet you.
Welcome to the team. Do you have any questions for me? Be prepared with some smart questions at this point, but this is almost a rubber stamp. The leadership team typically wants to meet you and make sure that. That they are comfortable with you moving forward. I very rarely see somebody rejected during this finalist interview stage.
Next step. Sometimes a recruiter, sometimes a hiring manager. But you're going to get into a verbal offer. Now, they may not call it a verbal offer. It's just [00:07:00] a conversation. Hey, can I catch you for a few minutes? I want to talk about some next steps. That's the intro that you'll get that's the call that you'll get but usually what this is a verbal offer And this is your chance to negotiate So you don't negotiate once you have a written offer in hand you negotiate when they're bouncing things back and forth Hey, what would you think about?
100k a year. How would that feel to you? I don't know. I would like 20% more than that What's the bonus look like this is where the back and forth can happen And where they can go back easily and without a lot of extra work, get an adjustment and bump one piece versus another. And this is where you're still informally having a conversation and you can get your desires noted.
The written offer ought to be the best and final. Like they've come back and they've said, this is my best and final offer for you. It's almost a take it or leave it once it's written. Remember, they've had to have a lot of [00:08:00] sign off and things when that happens and that's actually the next step.
So once you have negotiated the offer, this verbal offer, people don't like calling it that because it's a it's, it can be binding if they verbalize it as this is a verbal offer. It's really not. It's the negotiation period. Somebody's throwing out a number and you're throwing one back and you should treat it as a negotiation period.
It's really important to negotiate your offer, by the way. You can do really well on this, and you can do really badly on this negotiate that offer. I'll try to have a future video on what that means. Written offer is the next piece. Now what the recruiter and the hiring manager have had to do is they've had to go get a bunch of sign offs.
Finance has signed off, and the manager's boss has signed off, and everybody's gotten, everyone has approved in a system that you get this offer. Once that happens. Once they have their sign off and that's given in writing, you will have the opportunity. You'll get a copy of this and they'll say, here's your offer [00:09:00] and they'll give you some timeframe to sign it in.
They actually mean it by the way, they'll give you a couple of days to sign it. Chances are, it's coming, so you should have a feeling through that negotiation process of what it's going to be. This is just verification. Anything that you forgot, maybe you can throw out there, but I would not try to open negotiations unless there's a deal breaker.
So if there's something that you were negotiating for, they didn't include it, and that's a real deal breaker for you, that's when you, that's when you can raise it again in the written. piece. Otherwise, it's a real pain to go back and the risk of having someone walk away goes up once the thing's in writing.
Final step is a background check. Now, you may say, why in the world are they making the offer without a background check? I know it's counterintuitive. This happens all the time because the background check can take time. The background check is usually a couple of weeks to complete. Believe it or not, it's a pretty disorganized process on the back end, even though it looks clean to us, it's a relatively disorganized [00:10:00] process on the back end of this, going to all these different jurisdictions to get backgrounds.
These companies do this and do a good job of making it look easy. But it takes two weeks to do. The end result of that is you'll get an offer that's contingent upon passing a background check. So your offer will come back as contingent upon your background check completion. Now if you don't have anything significant in your criminal history, you really don't have much to worry about.
There are some jobs where they do a they'll check credit, but that's usually only jobs where you're handling money in some way. Banking, finance, if you're a, if you're a bank teller, for example, chances are you're going to have a credit check. If you're a if you're a a loan officer, for example, you might have to do that.
But normal jobs, a technologist, typically companies don't have you go and do a credit check for that. It's just not needed. They're only really allowed to [00:11:00] consider pieces of the background check that have something specifically to do with the job that you are being hired for. So I would expect to go through that if you don't have a criminal background of some sort.
If you do have a criminal background, this might be a nervous period for you, right? You may want to hold off on resigning from your previous job until you know that they're completely content. With your background as it stands there in many places. They're not allowed to ask anymore They used to ask, you've been convicted of felony and that's it.
That's now prohibited It's a initiative they call ban the box if you ever want to look that up. That's what that's all about so Background check is the last piece and then you're done. You're just ready to start your job start day is the next piece you Part of the offer typically has your start date listed and you just get ready to start on that day and that is, that's it.
That's all you need to know. Remember, this process guide is available to you at execcongress. com [00:12:00] slash hired. Execcongress. com slash hired. Happy to give this thing to you that I've been sharing , during this conversation. And hopefully this is helping you to find your next job, to find a better thing.
