@Ray: I’ve met maybe half a dozen people who interview the way you do. It takes a great deal of confidence and self-control to project mental instructions to employers ;-). Good for you!

All: Brian’s audience reveals what we all know. There’s a lot of frustration out there, and a lot submission to “the employment system,” which dictates how to go about a job search. At one extreme, Ray blows that up entirely. In general, I think anyone can change their behavior and shift their attitude – and project something very different to employers. “I’m here to do the job.”

>”Brian’s blog does not handle longer URL’s so I can’t refer to relevant articles there.”

There are a plethora of URL shorteners thanks to Twitter. Click my name to read a CIO article about them.

I enjoyed the Q&A and reading your responses to the comments.

Believe me, there is a lot of selling on both sides when it comes to a new vendor. I did one Nov – Jan where we had to sell the vendor on if we were the right kind of client they wanted to do business with. It didn’t matter we are the biggest in the industry, they wanted to make sure they got something from it other than just cash from us.

I’ve had five jobs in the last 46 years and only interviewed about 10 times, all resulting in job offers. I’m sure I came across as supremely confident in my ability to do the job. I also made it obvious – almost a given – that they would offer me the job. The only thing to be decided was whether or not I would accept the job, given the salary and benefits.
Three interviews involved techies entirely, the rest started with HR, but I quickly moved the interview from HR to the techies simply by making it obvious that only a techie was qualified to judge my qualifications.
They weren’t interviewing me, I was interviewing them. A great deal of success in interviewing (and life) depends on your basic mindset. If you present a viewpoint with sufficient self-assurance, as though it were obvious to anyone with a brain, people are reluctant to contradict it. That’s how good salesmen work, and to an extent, an interview is a sales situation – you selling yourself, the company selling a position.

You refer to vendors. I like to compare recruiting candidates to selling to prospective customers. When a company wants to close a sale, it sends its top sales person along with a technical person who understands the intricacies of the product to meet with the prospect.

To hire, a company sends an HR clerk to tell a candidate to fill out pages of forms and to pee in a cup.

It’s no wonder at all that companies have a hard time hiring the right people.

I really think a good portion of the attitude of candidates can be attributed to the process. HR people might say they need to protect the company from lawsuits or profit lose from a bad hire. Well, I have to do the same thing when looking for a vendor and the losses or profits can be millions or billions based on those decisions, and yet we keep it real without asking why is a manhole cover round.

Thanks, Nick, for pointing out a reality that few of Brian’s readers seem willing or able to accept: If you’re not talking to REAL people about REAL problems that you can solve profitably, you’re probably heading nowhere.

I have a job. It used to be so rewarding that I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else, but the new CEO has radically changed the culture so that it now sucks for nearly everyone who’s not part of the corporate office echo chamber. I’ve been looking for rewarding work for a while, and expect my efforts to bear fruit in the coming months.

Your advice has kept my outlook positive as I search for a company I want to work for, and develop the skills that I think will result in rewarding work. I think I’m well on the way to finding an employer (even if I wind up self-employed) whose values and priorities align with mine the way my current employer’s once did. Thanks for your continued assistance on this journey.