The One Skill You Cannot Improve

Another in a series I have written for my sons - that I wish someone had taught me.

We can improve almost anything we do in life except one thing. And if you were to write a top ten list of important things in life, this would be on it. It's probably in the top five. What is this magical skill that is so important, but we can never improve? It is applying for a job.

Getting a job is a skill vital to our well-being; physical, mental and spiritual. Work is important. However, finding a job, and getting a job is something you can never do better - if you learn only from experience.

Rarely will you receive honest feedback, if any feedback at all.

We can improve almost any other skill. Want to waterski? Take a course. Want to write better? Create something and see how people react to it, especially if that person is an English teacher with a red pen. Experience, review and assessment improve almost any other skill. Learning is a matter of: try, practice, feedback, repeat.

Applying for a job is different. When we apply for a job, we throw our resumes over the abyss of the application process. For each job, we spend an hour or more updating our resumes and carefully crafting a cover letter and sending it on its way. You would think such an action would at least merit the dignity of a reply.

The most common response is no response.

Silence is a poor teacher.

Ghosting has always been acceptable, if not the norm, of applying for a job. Here's the sad part. If you are applying for a job, you are saying, "I vote to give you the best part of my day. I may love my wife/husband/kids/dogs etc., but I am volunteering to spend 8 or more hours of daylight with you and not with them." To see how frequently that is treated with such disrespect is a shame.

We spend more time with our co-workers than with the person we vowed to spend the rest of our lives with.

Sometimes, as I have done, the desired job is a dream job, a seeming perfect match. We pour our hearts and souls out because it is such a great fit. However, too many screeners mistake excitement and enthusiasm for desperation. How sad for the candidate. How even sadder for the employer who hires the mercenary who could have had a loyal solider.

As an experienced leader and manager, here's what I know. The devoted team member dedicated to finding a solution is always better than hiring a smarter person who can fix something but never does.

I work in an industry where the average stay on the job is about 18 months. No wonder. We hire poorly. We retain poorly. Worse, we encourage poorly. We make excuses for those who are habitually late, and demand more from those we count on most. We justify our poor hiring decisions.

Once I had rare insight into how hiring works. I had applied to work at a museum as its Chief Development Officer. I did not even get an interview. It was in a medium-sized town, and I had already worked at much larger institutions.

I loved the mission of this museum.

In a brave moment, I called the HR department and asked if they would help me improve and let me know why they did not interview me. The HR director quickly replied, "We needed someone with fundraising experience." At that point, I had written three books on the subject, had taught tens of thousands of people how to fundraise and helped raise a couple hundred million dollars. Apparently, that was not fundraising experience.

About two years later, the same museum called me.

I was a consultant and they hired me to come in and, "fix fundraising." As I was working on it, in a rare candid moment, the CEO told me, "I wish you had applied for the position two years ago." Blood drained from her face when I told her I had. She tried to recover. "Surely, we would have hired you if I had known."

She did know.

She continued to make excuses. She did not admit what everyone at the museum knew; she hired someone whose significant qualification was that they were friends. That friend struggled from Day One to get the job done. Two years later, it was, "a mess." Her friend was and is a good fundraiser, and someone I know well; respect and admire. She was just asked to do an impossible job. She would thrive anywhere else and people would be glad and grateful to have her.

We will never get the honest feedback we deserve. They will not tell you that you were too thin, too blonde, too smart, too, "whatever." I have had the unfortunate experience of sitting in on hiring decisions where other managers made horrific and unmerited assumptions about people based on their background, hometown, heritage and height. The candidate may think he or she did not get the job because of a typo on the resume. The real reason was we were looking for a candidate with more hair, less gray hair or any number of wild stereotypes. I am embarrassed at some of the times I did not speak up to change this.

So what can you do?

1. Practice with friends, especially those who hire people. Seek honest feedback. Try different approaches. See what resonates. It's not perfect, but it is the best you can do.
2. Be yourself. You WILL lose jobs with this approach to people who "interview well," or who pad their resumes or who are friends with someone. However, if they hire you, they are getting the real you and there is a better chance you will both be happier and together longer.
3. Don't apply for a job. Press hard instead to develop a network. Let the job find you. The best jobs and candidates come together when they already know one another.
4. Ask employers what they saw best in you. Ask others why you were not hired. You will not get many answers. And the answers you get will likely be sanitized. However, the occasional gem of helpful truth turns up in the answer.
5. Know that when you are not hired, you are probably better for it. I have landed that dream job before. I found out the audience in the seats gets a great show, but behind the curtain the director tortures the actors each night to pain and tears - and the result is an exceptionally high turnover rate. The person who does not want to work with you is almost always someone you do not want to work with.
6. Hang in there. Just hang in there, and always try.

I want to end with a word of encouragement. The image at the top of the screen is of my book, Words of Encouragement. It is a simple book I wrote to help cheer people. To encourage them. If you need encouragement, if you have missed out on a great job, send me a message. The first person who writes to me, I will send them a free copy of the book. Postage and everything are on me. I just want to do something nice for someone today. Please write only if you need encouragement or know someone who does. And hang in there. The one skill we can always improve is being kinder to one another.