How Not to Get a Job, Part 3

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I’ve reserved for its very own blog entry what may be the most important tip I have for job-seekers: Never lie on the resume or in the interview.

Employers detest lies and usually can smell them. And a half-truth is considered the worst of all lies, as Alfred Lord Tennyson once observed.

When someone claims to have done something that is not associated with the job he or she held at the time, or when the applicant cannot provide details of an assignment or job, that’s usually a good sign that some unhealthy fibbing has occurred.

My favorite example is a lie we didn’t smell, but still uncovered through some standard checking.

After hiring an advertising professional a few years back, we called the company that he claimed was his current employer to do a standard check, only to discover that he had been laid off six months earlier.

I immediately rescinded the offer of employment because our business operates on a basis of trust. We are trusted because we are trustworthy. It takes only one lie to a client to destroy what years of honesty have built up.

The sad thing is that being laid off from an ad agency during a recession was, and is, no big deal, and would not have affected in the slightest what we thought of the job applicant.

A special type of lie is to submit a work sample that was not yours.  In my business, the most frequent work samples are writing or design samples.  Unbelievable as it might seem, in 20 years of doing business my company has uncovered three instances of people claiming writing that someone had done at Jampole Communications was their own work product! 

You ask, how could people be so dumb?

In one case, a former employee responded to a blind ad with work samples that others had written at the agency.  In another, the applicant had taken the work sample from a former employer who had engaged Jampole Communications to write it for them.

My last example is a bizarre variation on the theme of lying about a work sample: A client called us because someone claimed he/she had written something while employed at Jampole Communications. Now it was true the person worked briefly (and well) at my company and it was also true that the person had written the work sample she had submitted to my client.  Unfortunately she had not written it for us, but rather as a writing test as part of our hiring process.  While the sample was well written enough to get an entry level job at Jampole Communications, we would never have released it to a client or the public.  And our client (thank goodness!) recognized that the quality of the writing was beneath our high standards immediately. To claim that a writing test was work you did for a company as opposed to being a writing test to get a job is a fairly self-evident kind of lie to virtually every employer.

So what have we learned, class?

Follow directions, avoid mistakes, do research, never lie. If you run down this list of tips for job seekers, you’ll find these suggestions are precisely the skills that make for good employees. Sometimes they are called good work habits. But call them what you may, they not only increase the chance of landing the job but also help employees to thrive on the job and build successful careers.

How Not to Get a Job, Part 2

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Getting in the hiring mode has got me started on a screed about mistakes that far too many job applicants make.  In my last entry, I detailed faux pas on resumes and application forms.  Now to interviews.

I start with something that many people forget to do before the interview and that is research the company. Once you learn the identity of the potential employer, find out something about the organization. Since most companies have websites, researching a prospective employer has become relatively easy.

Employers always appreciate it when job applicants have taken the time to understand their businesses. Knowing something about the company can help you formulate questions and guide you in answering the employer’s questions. It enables you to present your experience and capabilities in terms of the employer’s needs.

What else? Focus on what you can do for the employer. In interviews (and also in cover letters) too many job candidates want to talk about only what they want out of a job.

One job applicant sent a press release, the lead of which was that he was sitting at home watching TV since he couldn’t find a job; another compared herself to a frog on a pond waiting for the “kiss of inspiration” from an employer to turn her into a princess of creativity.

I’ll leave it to the reader to determine if these were fresh, creative approaches; one thing I know is that they demonstrated a self-centeredness that does not make for a competent professional service provider.

To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, ask not what the employer can do for you, ask what you can do for the employer.

How Not to Get a Job

Posted on by Marc Jampole

We’re hiring again at Jampole Communications, and for the first time in a few years it’s because the business is growing past the resources of the existing staff.

Growth is good, but I think I’m not the only businessperson who has more fears approaching the hiring process than when involved in any other aspect of managing an organization, large or small.

Job applicants don’t make it any easier. Perusing through resumes and interviewing candidates makes me more aware than usual that the overwhelming majority of job candidates shoot themselves in the foot and don’t even know it.

I wrote in 2002 for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the many mistakes jobseekers make are a problem for them, but an even bigger problem for employers, especially at small businesses.

Virtually all my fellow employers tell me that hiring is the hardest thing they have to do. It’s made harder by the numerous missteps that most job applicants take.

In the interests of making life a little easier for the many people seeking jobs in the current tight marketplace as well as for the businesses doing the hiring, I want to present a few tips on applying for a job. What I have to say applies specifically to seekers of professional positions, but it should help other job applicants as well.

Make sure your application is error-free. About half of all cover letters and resumes we receive have grammatical, syntactical or spelling errors. If there is one mistake only and we like what we see on the resume, we will sometimes contact the applicant and ask that he or she find the error and resubmit. If there is more than one mistake, the resume goes into the trash bin.

Follow all directions. When a prospective employer asks you to provide something or do something, if you want the job, you had better follow the directions (assuming it’s legal and ethical).

For example, one time we placed a classified ad for a public relations writer, in which we asked that applicants send resumes and writing samples. We received 150 responses, but only 20 of them had writing samples enclosed. The other 130 went right into the trash bin.

Keep it relevant. While I may personally be intrigued by the job applicant who writes poetry or paints abstract images on guitar cases, it isn’t really relevant to the job we have to do every day.

Deciding what is relevant often involves a judgment call.

For example, participation in extracurricular activities and holding summer jobs are relevant when a job applicant has just graduated from college. They are no longer relevant five years later. But getting a full academic scholarship covering room and board for four years (as my son did! says the proud dad) or winning a Fulbright Fellowship—these kind of academic achievements are probably relevant until the end of your career.

No time for more right now, but next time I really should also write something about frequent interview mistakes that are killers.

Good Taste is Not Selling Out

Posted on by Marc Jampole

“Good taste is knowing how to eat right,” is the headline for a Diet Coke ad I found near the back of the GQ through which I recently flipped.  The ad depicts Tom Colicchio, supposedly an award-winning chef, seated in a plush restaurant booth, before him a luscious and healthy salmon dish that we are to assume he created, with a side of what looks like gorgeous red peppers.  In his hand is a glass filled with ice and a brownish substance, which we are to assume is Diet Coke.  Also on the beautiful redwood table is a glass bottle of Diet Coke.  The ad copy recommends that if we want some stylish and delicious healthy cuisine, we should visit the Diet Coke Kitchen at dietcoke.com

Once a chef suggests any sweet carbonated drink as the perfect liquid to accompany anything other than barbecued hot dogs and hamburgers, he or she loses all credibility to me, and to most educated people (I think… I hope).

How much money did Chef Tom get to endorse Diet Coke, or to pretend that it’s just right for a nice piece of salmon?  On the off chance that he really believes in the culinary virtues of Diet Coke, though, I recommend that my dear readers avoid his restaurants in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Las Vegas.

Note to Tom: Good Taste is Not Selling Out.

GQ: The Bible of the Other Directed

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Someone in my household bought the latest GQ to read the feature on Vladimir Putin, so naturally I took a look-see at this slick rag. 

The ads in GQ were just as I remembered them from the last time I perused a copy, probably some 25 years ago: very sharp photographs of highly-chiseled models in stylish clothing against nondescript backgrounds or in plush environments, all body imperfections whisked away electronically. 

What shocked me was the contrast in the sophisticated classic designs of the ads and the almost sloppy, thrown together look of most of the design of the editorial—except for a few features, most were bulletin-board arrangements of paragraphs, pull-out quotes, mini cartoons, clip art and factoids, in primitively primary colors and tiny type size, all presented with a kind of studied camp irony, as if the bulletin-board design were making fun of itself.  Bite-sized and well-sugared pieces of knowledge.

To use David Riesman’s terminology from his seminal work of sociology, The Lonely Crowd, GQ readers are upscale versions of the “other directed,” always seeking to follow the crowd and changing their opinion with the crowd changes.  Most of the magazine is dedicated to selling fashion and high-end consumer goods.  The underlying premise is that the purchase of consumer goods will attract the opposite sex.   Funny, GQ’s politics tend to be left of center and supportive of our left-of-center president, but the subtext, even of the politics, is inherently sexist.  Women in GQ become another possession. 

I was trying to figure out how GQ gets away with putting dozens of pages of advertising near the front of the magazine, page after page after page.  In a way, GQ forces you to flip every page (and thereby see all the ads) because editorial content is so sparse until the back of the book.  I suppose if the primary motivation is to understand what to buy and how to act to be cool, then you don’t mind looking at ads.

Harvesting the Sunday Newspapers

Posted on by Marc Jampole

As usual, there were a lot of disturbing trends to note in last Sunday’s newspapers.  Let’s skip the small stuff, such as the increasingly common misuse of “but,” “though” and “nevertheless” by reporters and public relations writers, and instead look first at a weird bit of “celebriosis,” and then at a long-term trend that has put serious literature on life support.

Celebriosis is the disease that makes editors want to connect a celebrity to every trend or cause, and Parade Magazine has had an advanced case of it for decades.  The issue dated September 4, 2009 is dedicated to helping people find a job, including articles on how to ace an interview and features on five people who were “winners” in the job market. 

The expert on job-seeking whom Parade put on the cover and who reminisced at length about his own job search was neither an economist nor a human resource professional, but Jay Leno.  Jay tells a few anecdotes, from which jobseekers and our nation’s youth can learn two lessons:

  • Work for free (which Jay did to get a job at a car dealership)
  • Work two jobs and save all your money from one of them. (Hidden message –you need to work two jobs to save).

Jay, and I call him Jay because after he bared his job-seeking soul I now feel as if I know him like a brother (sic), had the space in his 500-word pep talk for the unemployed to shill at great length for his new TV show.

Now to a trend in serious literature and poetry, which I believe is one of leading causes behind the growing disinterest in the literary arts.  The center spread—the absolute middle of the magazine—of the New York Times book review contained two reviews of recent fiction:

  • The Anthology by Nicholson Baker, about a man writing an introduction to a book of poetry.
  • Anna In-Between by Elizabeth Nunez about an editor.

The trend of course is to make writers, writing, teachers and editors the central subject of a novel or a poem.  If you peruse any literary journal, at least 10% of the poems are about poetry and poets, and in another 10-20%, the poet reminds the reader that the narrator is a real person who is a poet.  Writing about the writer infected the novel decades ago.

My objections:

  1. Anyone can write about him or herself.  It’s so much more challenging to write about other people.
  2. I’m a little tired of the inherent navel-gazing that writing about writers and writing involves.
  3. Since it’s been done to death, it’s akin to replowing farmland of which the soil has been depleted decades ago.  That usually yields a scrawny and inedible harvest, which pretty much describes most poetry and fiction these days.
  4. It turns off readers, although when I mention that notion to my friends who write poetry, they say that only writers are reading literature nowadays.  How depressing, but even if it were true, why not try to write beyond your audience? Why not try pushing your audience, as Joyce or Stevens and virtually all writers who are remembered and read after their death have always done?

The reviewer of the Baker book said the reason he liked it was because instead of making the novel about some first-paragraph straw man—hokey stories about poets—, this one is “actually about poetry.”  I would prefer if instead it were about some aspect of the human condition. 

 

Maybe the Times Deserves to Be Picked On?

Posted on by Marc Jampole

In the wake of two recent stories about people on Medicaid in which all the case histories were African-American, the New York Times today presented a story of brave and highly skilled Americans who have been looking for jobs so long that they have became discouraged and are no longer looking.  The four people, whom the Times drew from four distinct parts of the country, represent what may be a total 1.4 million people who want to work, but are not even considered as in the labor force and therefore are not counted among the unemployed.

All four of the people in the article, which in the national edition is a third of the first page plus one other page, are white (one with a Hispanic surname).  Just as the Times could not find a white who is on Medicaid in two articles on cutbacks hurting clinics, so it could not identify one black who wants to work but can’t find a job.

Interesting to note that both Medicaid articles limited the case histories to one city, whereas today’s article roamed from Kansas and Houston to North Carolina and Florida.  

You can blame it on the reporters, but editors are also to blame for what is looking more and more like a subtle attempt to reinforce traditional racial attitudes by the Times.

Doonesbury Copies a Master

Posted on by Marc Jampole

There are many variations on the old saw that there are relatively few patterns in human communication.  Some examples:

  • Jack Benn told only six jokes.
  • There are only 10 basic plots for all stories.
  • The theory of Theophrastus (371 b. c. e. – 281 b. c. e) that there are only 30 basic character types in drama.

A Doonesbury that I saw earlier this week reminds me that there are only a limited number of jokes and punch lines.  It represents a perfect example of reinvigorating a basic cartoon joke, one that has been around for millennia and is an important building block in the language of the cartoon. 

I remember first seeing this piece of cartoon rhetoric in the late 60s: Under a voluptuously wide tree, a young man and woman sit on a blanket.  His balloon is crowded with images that show he’s talking about everything from the theory of relativity to the possibility of happiness in a world haunted by death, his total monologue covering perhaps 25 distinct topics.  Her think balloon is a photo of the two of them making out on the blanket in the buff.

The trope is the dissonance in thinking between two people who share a moment together: one has his head in an ethereal and rather wordy place, the other is fixated on a basic instinct.  The joke relies on irony and the restatement of a widespread belief.

Garry Trudeau does an admiral job of breathing new life into this old trope, putting his new wine in an old rhetorical bottle.  His version comprises four panels, in each of which a CIA station chief wearing a cowboy hat makes a series of depressing comparisons between our current war in Afghanistan and the Viet Nam war.  He speaks a total of 54 words, which is really a lot for a newspaper weekday cartoon.  In the last panel, the think balloon above the incompetent slacker kid to whom he’s talking reads, “I could go for a kebob.”

Same joke delivered using the same rhetorical device.

Note that Trudeau communicates as his subtextual message one of the mainstays of ideological subtext in virtually all periods and all societies about which I remember reading: That the young are less competent and have less drive to succeed than their elders.  Interesting to note, in many civilizations such as our own, major subtextual themes involve both despising and worshiping young adults.

 

La plus ça change

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The old French expression, “la plus ça change,” or “the more things change… (the more they remain the same)” certainly applies to the health care reform debate.

While looking for something else on the bookcase in the Jampole Communications office today, I found a very intriguing soft cover book titled “Health Care Reform Terms” from Tringa Press, by Vergil N. and Debora A. Slee, both medical doctors.

What was both so fascinating and alarming about this 115-page dictionary of terms deemed important for the understanding of the health care industry and health care reform was that the Slees wrote and published it in 1993 during the period in which the Clinton Administration was developing its health reform plans.

Two depressing observations:

1.  That it took 115 pages to define all the terms and acronyms that someone needed in 1993 to be a knowledgeable participant in the debate.  I perused the terms and virtually all I recognized are relevant to the healthcare debate today.  Some examples: “standard benefit package,” “Blue Cross and Blue Shield,” “assignment,” “area wage adjustment,” NHSC, OBRA, OMB, “procedure,” “right to die,” “case management,” “single-payer system,” “smart card.”

2.  That the objectives of health care reform, as proposed in the Slees’ introductory overview, remain absolutely the same.  The Slees present these objectives as a series of single words, followed by short paragraphs of explanation. Here they are:

  • Cost
  • Waste
  • Equity
  • Access
  • Accountability
  • Quality
  • Prevention
  • Security

The single word headlines are enough to make us realized how foolishly our society has squandered the last 16 years when it comes to creation of a modern health care system that ensures that everyone gets the health care that should be the basic right of all peoples while controlling cost.

Ideological Subtext, Part 3

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The New York Times today offered two examples of ideological subtext, which roughly speaking is the embedding of a basic value, belief or social axiom into the subtext of a communication.  The reference to the belief usually is unnecessary to the understanding of the article, and sometimes runs counter to the facts that the article is exploring.

Here are the examples, both from the national edition, published in Canton, Ohio:

  • Here is the description of Erich Kunzel in the first paragraph of his obituary: “Erich Kunzel, who conducted the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra for more than three decades, undermining the pretensions of symphonic music in more than 80 recordings….” The ideological subtext is that classical music has “pretensions.”  The writer could have just as easily said,”…and dumbing down people’s understanding of music by conflating ‘Pops’-style orchestrations with legitimate classical music in more than 80 recordings…”  Or more even-handedly, the writer could have written, “…popularizing ‘Pops-style’ orchestral music in 80 recordings…”
  • The lead story on the “National” page concerned another Medicaid clinic in trouble.  There were three photos and all were of African-Americans (one also had a physician who clearly looked either subcontinental or middle eastern).  I have now seen five photographs in two feature articles in the Times on Medicaid clinics in trouble in the past few weeks and all the photos focused on African-Americans.  Again, the overwhelming number of Medicaid recipients are white.  Now it is possible that across the country only clinics serving African-Americans are in trouble; if so, that’s the real story and the New York Times should cover it.  As is, the ideological subtext to the story is that only Black people are on the public dole.

I’m not picking on the New York Times, but it’s the newspaper I read everyday.  I am going to start giving examples of ideological subtext from other news media over the next few weeks.