Every week, NETSHARE hosts Ask the Coach, a phone-in coaching session with leading career management experts. Here is an excerpt from our most recent session with Christine Dennison, The Job Search Coach.
As part of our weekly career coaching call, NETSHARE members will call, email, and tweet their questions for our coaches to answer. As a change of pace this week, we thought we would offer the questions as they were presented, with the responses by this week’s expert, Chris Dennison:
Q: Can you discuss working with, finding and approaching Private Equity firms?
To quote from Chicago politics, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.” Job search success depends heavily on relationships and referrals. There also are search firms that include work with private equity and venture capital firms in their specialties; check the Kennedy Information Directory. Banks, investment banks and accounting firms also have those relationships, so see who’s in your network who can introduce you. There are also firms that keep a stable of interim managers on tap, such as Tatum LLC, which has offices across the country.
Q: In the past I held two C-level positions (CEO and COO) at relatively small firms (under $10M). I have been looking for a position as General Manager/Director/Vice President for which I consider myself well-qualified, but I am getting the impression that recruiters and hiring managers are dissuaded by my previous C-level positions. Perhaps they are thinking that I no longer have the energy to "work," that I might not be used to reporting to someone, that I am just looking for an "interim" position. How do I overcome this?
Your best strategy is to focus on connecting your ability with their specific pain. Then the resume can (and should) be more of an afterthought. If you’re using the resume as a door-opener, it’s much more difficult to avoid the typecasting and assumptions. Job search conversations and relationship development are especially critical situations like yours.
Q: During this difficult economic time, some candidates may have issues in their background check related to home short sales or other financial issues. Do you have any suggestions on how to deal with this, or do these topics even come up on the typical employment background check?
Background checks are becoming more prevalent, but many states are trying to update their laws to keep them fairer. For the most part, an actual credit check should only apply to positions that include handling money. Most of the time you will have had a chance to win them over before a background check is performed, but it’s still difficult to figure out if and when to bring up any negative information that may be in your record. Companies shouldn’t poke around for information that isn’t relevant to your ability to do the job, but that doesn’t mean they won’t. Of course, if you are turned down you might have grounds to sue them, but where does that get you?
Q: You go on a face-to-face interview. It goes exceedingly well and you get very positive feedback in terms of comments made and body language. But once you leave the building it turns into a literal black hole. The HR contact doesn't respond to your emails or return your phone calls, even though you strongly suspect that you're going to get called back for a second interview. Is the HR contact dodging you because he/she literally doesn't know when the next round of interviews is going to take place? And if that's the case, what's the best course of action? Stop trying to contact them? The "not knowing" is leading me to some sleepless nights.
“They” don’t usually mean to leave you hanging. It’s good to ask during the interview what the next steps will be and the timetable. Then you have a reason to follow up, but add a week to whatever they say. HR is usually in a state of frustration, trying to keep the decision-makers moving the process along. It’s perfectly reasonable for you to be professionally persistent –just be sympathetic to HR’s challenges. As much as we would love to be the center of their work schedule, that’s never the case.
