jacqueline levy

Career Counseled

by Jacqueline Levy

Having recently joined the ranks of the unemployed due to a company “restructuring”, the time had come to pursue my so-called career elsewhere. Either that, or continue waking up every night in a panicked sweat from a nightmare about a jumbo mortgage sucking out my savings like some kind of financial dementor in a Harry Potter movie. Like Harry, I needed to take action. Unfortunately, unlike Harry, I had no magic wand. However, I did have a free month at a career counseling company, courtesy of my former employer.

I attended the initial class with some trepidation. Would I be surrounded by losers who could not hold a job? Wait a minute! Isn’t that me? Wait just another minute! My whole department was laid off and I know the other forty people were not losers – well, OK, maybe just that one guy who wore the same faded Grateful Dead T-shirt every day and spent undue time with the paper shredder. But since he was the exception, maybe the class would be filled with people simply caught in the “world is flat” crossfire like I was.

With this more uplifting attitude, I donned a new blazer picked up from the Ross sale rack, dug into my closet and blew the dust off a pair of black pumps, and then brought this new professional, non-loser-looking me to the class.

The first thing we learned was how to create our “thirty second commercial”. The idea here is that if you get in an elevator with a stranger, by the time you reach your floor, you will have so enchanted the unsuspecting victim with such a concise yet dynamically delivered litany of your talents that you will be offered a job on the spot. Ideally, this stranger is Donald Trump and not the night clerk at the neighborhood convenience mart, but this is an unimportant detail. After all, that vacant-eyed night clerk just might have a brother-in-law whose high school shop teacher went to summer camp with a kid whose cousin delivered the morning paper to Donald Trump’s former gardener, and that is practically the same thing.

This was, of course, the unifying theme of all the ensuing career counseling classes: network, network, network. Each class began with each “candidate” (as we were affectionately called by the staff and, I have to admit, a better term than “loser”) regaling everyone with his thirty second commercial, in the hope of making a connection. It struck me as unlikely that a roomful of people who were just laid off would be recommending their former company, or if they knew of an opening at another company that they would share their precious insider’s information. Still, in the words of Fats Waller, “One never knows, do one?” In fact, wasn’t that Donald Trump’s ex-gardener I just glimpsed watering the potted palm by the coffee station?

If networking is an unqualified success, a candidate will merely share a few lunches with friends and voila! A job offer with higher pay and more vacation materializes before anyone can say “Check, please!” But we shy and awkward mortals must resort to more extreme measures. We must write a resume.

Classes were consumed with discussions of whether to use the chronological versus functional resume layout, what skills to highlight in a summary, and above all whether to use Times New Roman or Arial font. At least a full hour was devoted to when point size 10 was more appropriate than point size 12. Furthermore, the modern resume must be strewn with strong action verbs such as “analyzed”, “innovated”, and “spearheaded”. (Note that although “annoyed”, “misappropriated”, and “atrophied” are also strong action verbs, they do not belong on a resume). Thankfully, clear guidance was given on how to translate our former duties to the proper action verbs. For instance, in my final months on the job, I excelled at avoiding activities I hated. On my resume, this became the word “prioritized”. I was also relieved to find out I had not been passing the buck. Rather, I had “delegated”. And those times I crawled to my boss? Apparently, I had “escalated”.

Most importantly, a resume must deny that the 80’s ever existed. Sure, everyone wants experienced workers, but not anyone old enough to actually have had big hair, stirrup pants, and oversized suit jackets with linebacker shoulder pads. And may heaven help you if you ever sported polyester print shirts from an even more unmentionable decade. If you must go back that far in time, you must lump everything into a vague “Other Professional Experience” subheading. The date of your college graduation is, of course, strictly taboo, unless it was just last spring break that you partied in Key West, in which case you must stop reading this article immediately and remove those photos from your MySpace page.

After going through more editing than a sitcom pilot script, I hoped my resume had become, as the folks at Disney like to say, a timeless classic. Now I was ready for the next course: interview strategies.

We covered the usual shtick about firm handshakes and eye contact. We learned about wearing neutral colors and being well-groomed. (Well-groomed? And to think I had always thought that word applied only to poodles.) But mostly, we learned how to answer the top ten interview questions. As we reviewed the right way to answer such questions, I discovered I needed to get the wrong answers out of my system:

Question: “Why are you interested in our company”?

Right answer: “Your product line and marketing strategy indicate the kind of forward thinking that suits my own creative and energetic work style”.

Wrong answer: “You’re five minutes from my house and I hear you not only give out free gym memberships, but have complimentary donuts every morning.”

Question: “What are your future plans”?

Right answer: “I would like to utilize my management skills to help grow this company into a market leader both domestically and internationally”.

Wrong answer: “I would like to cash in my hire-on bonus stock options within three to six months and retire to a beach home in Costa Rica”.

Question: “How did you get along with your last manager?”

Right answer: “We worked together as a seamless team, each of us supporting the other in our mutual goals to benefit the company.

Wrong answer: “I was nowhere near her car that day her tires got slashed”.

The interview course continued with the instructor videotaping each of us in a practice interview. Worse than that, the instructor made us view the videotape in front of the whole class. This helped each candidate become aware of her personal annoying habits so that she could vanquish them during a real interview. You blink your eyes too much? Begin each sentence with “Ummm….”? Suffer from unseemly sweat stains? No problem. Now that you have seen these habits first-hand, you will simply stop doing them, despite a lifetime spent developing them. Yeah, right. More likely, now that you know how unattractive and inarticulate you appear, you will add a nervous tic or two to your repertoire special for the interview process. In the end, you may have to resort to your grandmother’s advice about picturing the interviewer in his underwear – and hope they are not doing the same with you.

Ready or not, my free month of career consulting flew by faster than a stack of resumes is tossed from a human resource manager’s desk into the recycle bin. With my head stuffed with do’s and don’ts, and armed with my thirty second commercial and, better yet, my Ross blazer, it is time for me to go face the world. But first, I think I will have lunch with a few friends and call it networking. Several of them watch “The Apprentice” so who knows where it may lead?