By Jeff Altman, Big Game Hunter
When I was a new recruiter back in the Stone Age, one of the first people I interviewed had been out of work for 4 months. I asked him where he had been in interviews and he rattled a list of 19 companies with which he had interviewed and had all rejected him. 19 companies.
When I brought my notes from the interview to a more experienced person in my office, I was told not to represent him. After all, 19 companies had evaluated him and found him missing. It was likely that his skills were not as good as he claimed they were.
He was right. A year later, this person eventually found a job in a small company that no one in my market area had any considerations.
Once someone has been out of work for a year, companies participate in a similar mental process that starts over them, and ask themselves, “What’s wrong with this person that they had been out of work for a year? Why did they interview in a number of companies and no one else wanted to hire them?”
Unless an explanation is provided proactively, hiring leaders and HR people are left with their doubts and concerns to consider. Because time is precious and the likelihood is that all these other companies were not wrong in assessing this person, companies do not interview candidates who have been out of work for a long time because they do not see a reason to waste their time on a chance that this person may actually be better than all the other companies have thought they should be.
Yes, when you are out of work for a long time, you desperately needed jobs … bad. The question in an employer’s mind is not whether you forgot anything but whether you ever knew it to begin with. After all, so many other companies have evaluated and evaluated you for that knowledge and you were found missing. What will be somebody different this time?
Again, without any explanation offered proactively to hire leaders and HR people are left to their own imagination to consider that question, and trust me, you will always come up in their thinking.
Ⓒ The Big Game Hunter, Inc., Asheville, NC 2016, 2021, 2025
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About Jeff Altman, Big Game Hunter
People hire Jeff Altman, Big Game Hunter to give no BS career counseling globally because he makes many things in people’s careers easier. These things can involve job search, hire more efficiently, manage and lead better, career transition and advice on solving workplace problems.
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He hosts “No BS Job Search Advice Radio”, # 1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 3000 episodes.
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