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Reality Check: Strategy for Finding Work in Tough Times
By Kim Head
According to Forbes more than 500,000 U.S. workers have been laid off since January. That means many people are finding themselves in the dreaded hot seat – the receiving end of the job interview.
For many it will have been some time since they had to interview for a job, and they will find that over the years the questions have changed. Recruiters and human resources managers are unlikely to conduct a strictly technical interview, expecting to hear facts and yes or no answers. Today recruiters conduct ‘behavioral’ interviews, which elicit responses that enable them to determine how the interviewee works with others and how he or she handles specific situations. Questions such as “Tell me how you dealt with a team member who wasn’t pulling his weight on a project?” and “Give me an example of how you handled a situation with conflicting deadlines?” are examples of what might be asked.
Velma Arney, associate director of the Ford Career Center at the McCombs School, says that the questions focus on your abilities in specific environments. “This is the opportunity for companies to asses the candidate by asking behavioral questions that may also involve technical abilities,” says Arney. “They do this to determine whether the interviewee fits within the company culture.” Making sure the candidate fits will save companies money in the long run, since much is invested in interviewing, hiring, and training.
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Val Gatson, college relations manager for Northern Trust Company, says that some skills, such as global awareness, leadership, time management, and planning, are now more valued than others. “We use the behavioral interview to focus on a candidate’s initiative,” he says.
Especially when a candidate’s degree or previous career doesn’t exactly match the requirements of the position listed, it is extremely important to understand the transferable skills he or she has, Gatson says. “The importance of creative skills is also increasing,” he believes. “More and more companies will focus on how you can adapt. Can you communicate well, give presentations, and work on a cross-functional team?”
Is There Hope?
While news reports on the job market continue to be grim, experts see light at the end of the tunnel—thanks, believe it or not, to information technology.
By now everyone is familiar with IT’s role as the culprit in recent events. When the information economy was soaring, companies hired and paid madly to keep pace, but when tech took a downturn, these same companies shed workers in “real time,” as a dot.com exec might say.
During the heyday of the boom, some key points were missed, according to Prabhudev Konana, assistant professor of MSIS at the McCombs School. Konana and his colleagues at the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce believe that companies using Internet technology have still just barely touched on the Web’s full capabilities to conduct business more efficiently.
More and more companies will begin to utilize the Internet and information technology to its full advantage, and as they do, there will be more need for IT savvy employees to handle the transition. “Jobs will become more tech-intensive,” says Konana. Gatson agrees, and adds that streamlining operations will help make the human contact within a business more effective and efficient.
Rather than the technology moving us away from one-on-one service, it will simply make that service of better quality. “Personal skills are still extremely important and will be a healthy balance with expanding technological know-how,” says Gatson.
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