6 Problems You Can Face When Applying For Job

The take-aways from a discourse with a young professional trying to get hired

A few weeks back, I was reached out by a person for advice on how to improve their potential in winning employment opportunities while having to deal with certain hiccups in their career.

I really admire this quality of such platforms like OPEN Islamabad, that they enable people to reach out to other relevant people in the community and share knowledge, ideas and value. So I wanted to maximize the impact of our discussion and share it with you all as well so that those facing similar problems can also benefit from our conversation, and so I took their permission to share these pointers without disclosing their identity.

We discussed the following 6 points in our conversation:

1. Short durations of employment in the past and inconsistencies in the employment history
2. Diversity of experience vs. Focus on specialized experience
3. Overlap of employments in the resume
4. Expecting a salary inconsistent with the current salary
5. The closure of interviews with a cliffhanger, e.g. “We will get in touch.”
6. Desired job opportunities require experience that only they seem to offer

Employment History

Short durations of employment in the past and inconsistencies

A lot of the times, professionals in their earlier years of the career make a lot of job switches. Keeping an empathetic point of view, let’s consider this is because of a series of bad choices, unfulfilling opportunities or rather awful experiences. Similarly, sometimes the employment histories are not consistent — there are gaps between work experiences. Do such details make potential employers skeptical about these profiles?

The answer is, of course, yes! At the point of the evaluation of a resume or job application, the employers have to make decisions on the basis of the information in front of them. And past behavior is potentially the best predictor of the future behavior. So yeah, to a recruiter or a talent acquisition person, such a profile will not look attractive. Why? These details appear to be an evidence of:

1. One’s issue with long term commitments, which makes them less dependable. No employer is looking to hire for a permanent position an employee that they fear they may lose in a couple of months.
2. Escaping from challenges, as it seems that as soon as the “honeymoon period” of the job is over, one chooses to leave.
3. Being hard to work with, as the employer will have to be on their toes all the time just to keep you interested and motivated, which is a headache. Employers prefer self-motivated people as their employees.

One thing that a potential employer might do is reach out to your previous employers for background check. But even in that case, it is hard to make sure that all of them will have good things to say about you after you have left them, especially if the reason of your departure was problematic.

So ideally if you are making a decision about leaving a job within a few months, think hard about the reasons that are making you do this. And at least try your best not to do the same too often.

Diversity of experience vs. Focus on specialized experience

Sometimes, the initial years of work experience of the professionals is astonishingly diverse. People are usually experiment with different roles to find what suits them, or what they are better at. On the contrary, it can also be an active choice to acquire a variety of experience to present oneself as all-rounder performer.

Why can it be a problem? Well it would depend on the opportunity that you are rooting for. Depending upon the company as well as the position, it can either be a strength or a weakness.

Overlap of employments in the resume

Nowadays, given the ease of remote jobs or need to earn more, a lot of people choose to engage in more than one jobs at the same time. Sometimes these are part time jobs, or freelance, or even opportunities to volunteer for certain organizations. On their career profiles, this engagement may appear to be ambiguous as to how a person is simultaneously engaged in multiple jobs at different platforms.

How to make it work?

In order to make any of the above issues with your employment history work for you, your resume should:

1. Highlight your strengths — the focus of your profile should be on what you bring to the table. Try to mention what changes you have brought in the previous experiences to make it about the impact of having you in the team instead of the duration of it.
2. Avoid ambiguity — explain the nature of your work experiences so that they don’t have to assume stuff. You never want recruiters to find gaps and then fill them on their own.
3. Include a cover letter — if you realize that there are things in your resume that may not make sense on their own, it is always better to include within your resume, a cover letter to make sense of those things.
4. Leave the viewer at a cliffhanger — make them wonder about certain things that you would want them to ask you in an interview. You have to make them curious enough to let them not close your application without an interview.

Salary: Current vs. Expectation

There are different trends coexisting the market regarding the assessment of a candidate’s potential worth in terms of their salary. Some employers ask for the candidate’s current or last withdrawn salary as a part of their evaluation. Others choose to ask for their salary expectation in the role that they are being evaluated for. Some have the audacity to ask for both and then there are those who ask for none.

Ideally, both these questions are irrelevant. Companies advertising job opportunities should have an internal mechanism of doing a market research and fixing a salary for each opportunity. But companies fear rejection and therefore do not want to miss good talent in the market because of their higher expectations in terms of the compensation. If they raise the bar, they fear they may end up hiring someone who may not be worth the salary fixed on the higher end to avoid missing good talent.

Answers to both these questions help companies differently. The knowledge of the expected salary of a candidate helps a company gauge the impression the candidate is going to have of the offer the company plans to make. Also, it helps the company in planning how flexible they should be with the offer they are going to make, in light of the evaluation of the candidate as well.

The knowledge of the current salary of a candidate helps companies in gauging for how low an offer they can settle for or, in other words, what is the lowest that we can offer while still being acceptable to the candidate.

How to deal with that?

My personal point of view regarding this is that the question of the current salary is not just irrelevant, it is invasive. Not a company should not be deciding their offer based on the answer to this question, they should do without asking this at all because it is up to people if they want to disclose this information to anyone. Even if it is asked as a question that is not mandatory to answer, a candidate may feel obliged to answer just because not answering may look negative to the recruiter. The question on expectation I believe is rather harmless, as an employer can have an idea whether they can afford to match those expectations or not. If an employer thinks that getting that information may influence them to increase the offer even before sharing the original offer with the candidate, they can avoid asking this question as well. Again, ideally, both these questions should not be needed, as a position should be advertised with the offer of its compensation mentioned, so that their are is no ambiguity.

So as an applicant, what I do and I suggest everyone is to:

1. Avoid responding to the question of your current salary.
2. Feel free to share an expectation, but try to do a research before that so that you are aware of what is being offered for similar roles in the market and you don’t come off as ignorant.

Interview: Closure and Follow Up

Interviewers don’t give away results of interviews right away, which is understandable for 2 reasons:

1. They need time to evaluate your application before making up their minds about you instead of being hasty.
2. A lot of times it is not an absolute evaluation and every candidate is being evaluated in comparison with other candidates, so that the best one gets the offer in the end.

Therefore, a lot of times, interviewers end the interview at a cliffhanger: “We will get back to you soon”.

And then don’t get back! A lot of them don’t. In fact, a lot of “us” don’t. It is usually due to a lack of automation as it is hard to get back to each and every candidate after interviews. Sometimes, the process just takes too much time and candidates are restless.

What should we take from such a response?

The reason for such a response in the most cases is genuine, and they really don’t know right away whether they will need to take you to next stage of hiring or not. Considering that, you should:

1. Wait for a significant amount of time, like three days to a week, and reach out to the person who contacted you for to interview and ask for a status update. In the most cases, you will get an actual update.
2. If you don’t get an actual update, and you feel like they are just lingering on, or, in other cases, if they do not respond at all, it’s unfortunate, but you will have to let it go. And in case they reach out to you later or come across you in some other way in the future, make sure to communicate your experience to them so that they are aware of it.

Requirement of Experience

If you are coming across job opportunities that you are interested in but you are falling short of the requirement of experience, that is definitely a bummer. It’s almost instinctive to ask how you can have an experience that you cannot acquire because the opportunities to acquire that experience also require the experience.

How to make up for that?

While it is true, the solution here is to try and be a step ahead. Look for the ways to acquire the experience otherwise — working with start ups and small businesses, freelancing, or even volunteering. It should give you exposure to the work and relevant tools. On top of it, you can continue to learn and develop with the help of resources available online. You can keep looking for ways to acquire hands-on experience as well. Of course this varies for the kind of work you want to do and may not be applicable always. However, you have to figure this out on your own and look for relevant mentors and platforms to explore new ways of acquiring relevant knowledge and skills.

While this was just a conversation and therefore may not be relevant to everyone as it is, but I hope that it helps everyone reading it in some way or the other. If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to comment and reach out for discussion anytime. Best of luck!