All attendees were bright and eager for opportunity to network and receive feedback on their 30-second introduction. Four or five students would sit at my table, do their introduction, absorb their critique and then move to the next table to repeat the exercise. At the end of the night, they had the opportunity to practice their presentation six times, hopefully refining their message based on the critiques.

It was clear the graduate students had more on the ball that the undergraduates, or at least a higher level of self-confidence. They had a clearer vision of their career path and answered questions with greater clarity.

Almost without exception, everyone used more than 30 seconds for their presentation, a minor misdemeanor. A more serious infraction was lack of focus and how they were going to move forward. And only one student had a specific company in mind. My suggestion was to research your industry, pick three companies and then introduce yourself and ask for help into networking your way into any of these three companies.

One or two students had an underlying attitude that they were expecting their future employer to make the first move – without any real thought as to how to connect to the marketplace. I challenged this line of reason, “Leaving your career to the care of others is not a good habit. You are fully responsible for your career. You may not know how to do all you need to do to move forward in your career, but if you will embrace this idea about responsibility, the details will work themselves out in ways you never expected.”

I was a little surprised that I had to ask so many people to “speak up.” While they were competing with a moderate level of noise in the room, I was just imaging what it is going to be like at a busy job fair – they will be completely drowned out. A few women were soft spoken and one young man had a beautifully rich deep voice, but he spoke in a near whisper. As I mentioned to several, “If people can’t hear you, they won’t know how to respond and they will not know how to help you. Right now, you need people to help you.”

I applaud each of the students for attending the networking session. Their attendance shows initiative and a willingness to put themselves into an uncomfortable situation with a room full of strangers. Hopefully, the critiques provided some insight into better crafting their message. They have taken an important step in their transition from student to professional, so they can begin to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

2. The job description should DESCRIBE the job, not the skills required for the job. Many job descriptions, especially those in technology, list required skills and technologies, but never mention that you will be developing a critical new Point of Sale application or that a majority of the work is simply maintaining existing code. Because technology matures so rapidly, candidates usually have a greater interest in HOW technology is being used than in a particular version of software, which will be obsolete in a few months.

Why does a company require 5 to 7 years accounting experience? How exactly is this level of accounting expertise going to be used on the job? Is the position simply running reports – or is the emphasis on analysis and critical thinking? A great job description helps the candidate “see” the day-to-day activities of the position. Another way to help the candidate better understand the position is to break the job down into parts: 50% second-level technical assistance with the Fortune 500 clients, 20% research and bug resolution, 25% remote and class room training for new employees, 5% administrative reports.

3. If properly written, an excellent job description can be the basis for future performance reviews. A performance-based job description highlights the most important deliverables and how success will be measured in time and output. Performance-based job descriptions help frame the interview and provide a context to discuss expected behaviors for superior performance. An effective performance-based job description will help attract A Players and screen out lower performers.

Job Competencies include different types of thinking, such as Analytical, Conceptual or Strategic – together, these are the components of Critical Thinking. A superior sales person would be particularly strong in Relationship Building, Persuasion, Interpersonal Understanding, and Customer Service Orientation. In training, a superior performer would also have Persuasion skills along with a high level of Integrity and be able to Develop Others. A few more of the 24 job competencies include Organizational Awareness, Organizational Commitment, Initiative and Flexibility.

At a recent talk at Dallas Baptist University (Frisco Campus), I was ask if “underlying characteristics” are something we learn or something that is part of our DNA. I don’t think competencies are part of our hardwired DNA other than to say much of who we are is a direct impact of our formative years. We pick up the accent of the community we grow up in and absorb the neighborhood’s cultural norms. Someone growing up in the Bronx is going to have a different accent and a different set of life experiences than the kid growing up in the prairies of South Dakota.

As an air force brat, I lived in three states (six seperate towns) and two foreign countries. You would think I would have had a culturally diverse youth, but in fact, residence of air force bases are a remarkable homogenous group. There are shared group norms – everybody goes to the base hospital, shops for groceries at the commissary and goes over to the base PX for socks and underwear. It is a tribal community that would be foreign to someone in a neighboring town.

While our youth helps define our core being, life does change albeit in mostly tiny increments. Like a wrench tightening a loose bolt, our lives are constantly being “adjusted” through cultural and political events, the dynamics of family events, and our own professional career path and day-to-day life experiences. And each generation has its own heroes and global events that shapes the window to the world.

Over the years, I have taken many people though a 10-minute competency exercise to help them identify their top six job competencies. While we all have a distinct “competency model” to offer the work place, I think our personal competency model adapts over time based on the job assignments and the degree our interests and limitations allow the model to change.

Someone who is rigid and sees the world in black and white may have a clearer understanding of how to leverage their current competency model in the workplace. However, in the long-term, they will have a difficult time making the necessary adjustments to assure their model is always command a premium price.

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• 68 percent of employees say it is a good time to increase workplace responsibility – up 5 percent from last year
• 50% of employees say it is a good time to look for a new job with a higher salary – down 4 percent from last year

Building Value in the Company
The article draws on the advise of several workforce experts. Dan Schawbel argues: “A regular 9-to-5 day is not enough during this recession” and adds, “If you’re content on taking the easy route, you’ll be replaced by someone willing to work harder.”

Dan suggests two strategies to help secure your career:

1. Take on more work to provide greater value
2. Build a brand outside of the company in case the economy continues to slide and you are hit with a layoff

Become Market-Drive
Another contributor, Mark Roberts, challenges workers to “become market-driven within your company to determine exactly how to take on more work.” If you are going to add two or three more hours to our work week, you need to carefully choose your priorities. Roberts suggests identifying new projects that solves an important business problem. “Hunt for problems to solve that contribute to the future of the company, which will contribute to your job security.” Picking a high impact project is working harder and smarter.

Robert challenges workers to “take a small amount of money and accomplish a lot with it.” This requires creativity, a strong network of go-to people and thinking like the CFO.

Another strategy for job security is to examine the work that is being outsourced. Can you do it better? This is a good time to review existing contracts to determine what can be brought back inside and what the cost savings would be for the company.

Building Value Outside the Company
While you are working harder inside the company, you have to also work harder outside the company – to build your network and your brand. In a layoff situation, a broad network that respects your expertise often makes the difference between a soft landing and a crash and burn scenario that takes months to rebound from.

While the SHRM list lists Critical Thinking and Problem Solving together, I would like to unbundled them as individual components. Critical Thinking is an internal process that involves gathering and analyzing a variety of data and recollections. It is the gathering and analysis stage. Problem solving provides the opportunity to apply our critical thinking. Problem solving is about sifting through the data, prioritizing the data and selecting which data can best be brought together to resolve an issue for the longest period of time. In our competitive global economy, effective Critical Thinking is the catalyst to solve increasingly complex business problems.

In my mind, “problem solving” is easier to comprehend than “Critical Thinking.” I hope I am not the only one who has a difficulty grasping the entirety of critical thinking. As I try to problem solve toward a proper definition of critical thinking, I pull from my knowledge of competencies in Chapter 6 of InterviewRX. Competencies are formally defined as the key measurable work habits and personal skills needed for superior performance.

Which of 26 job competencies will best define “Critical Thinking?” I selected two primary competencies and one supporting competency to help solidify our understanding of Critical Thinking. The primary competencies include:

1)    Conceptual Thinking: Ability to see patterns no obvious to others; Notices inconsistencies most people overlook; Reviews complex data and identifies relationships from disparate sources; Able to convey ideas through original analogies and metaphors.

2)    Analytical Thinking: Sees implication or consequences; Analyzes situations systematically; Anticipates obstacles and ways to get around them, thinks ahead; Analyzes what is needed to accomplish a goal.

Bundled together, Conceptual and Analytical Thinking helps frame the dynamics and brings vitality to the concept of Critical Thinking. A third competency is Strategic Thinking, which is particularly relevant the higher you are in an organization.

3)    Strategic Thinking: Competitive industry analysis, Understanding Strengths/Weaknesses, as compared to competitors; Understands market/industry trends; Able to leverage organization’s competitive advantage to meet customer needs.

If you are in job transition, you have to figure out a way to convey your comfort level, if not your expertise in one or more methods of thinking: Conceptual, Analytical or Strategic. How have you used these components to solve problems? Think about past challenges, what obstacles you have overcome, what data you relied on, and what steps you took to solve the problem at hand. Using three layers – Situation-Action-Results, outline several compelling career stories to share. Your career stories should be about a minute long. The critical component is to be specific on the results. Specificity will add impact and crystallize your accomplishments. Mentioning you reduced departmental turnover from 58% to 32% peaks a hiring manager’s interest. Saying that you hired less people last year might be interrupted your department is shrinking because of your ineffective leadership style, not because you increased morale and reduced turnover.

Correct delivery of effective career stories will linger with the hiring manager long after you are gone. Focusing on Critical Thinking and results of your problem solving abilities will move you rapidly forward in the screening process. When they are able to “see” you being successful  in their organization, an offer will follow.

1. Your strengths, when unchecked, become your weaknesses, or as author Michael Watkins (The First 90 Days) notes, “Every strength has it attendant pitfalls.” While someone’s independence and assertiveness may help them lead a company, if unbalanced with a good dose of social responsibility, integrity, and interpersonal understanding then we are left with the framework for a cavalier bully.
2. Someone constantly tripping over their own ego rarely wins the race. How many managers do you know that compromise their effectiveness because they put their needs before the company’s, or push their agenda without regard to the ideas of their peers?

The author’s interest is to make visible our counterproductive blind spots, come to grips with their negative impact and replace the cloak that shields us from reality with a healthy dose of continued self-awareness. Self-awareness will enable us to more easily discern and learn from our shortcomings. In short, Chris Argyris provides a lesson on life and sustained success.

Argyris takes a disciplined approach and insists on us taking full responsibility for our learning actions. This includes one of the most difficult aspects, learning from our life’s failures. Learning from our shortcomings is a simple concept, but a practice rarely seen in corporate environments. Because of the opaqueness of our blind spots, it is easier to learn from other people’s mistake because their errors are much easier to “see” and in many ways, more assessable.

For most of us, learning from our mistakes is not part of our everyday vernacular. We have enough worries without being pressed to be critical of our own behavior. Argyris argues it is particularly difficult for “Smart People” because these “professionals… rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never leaned how to learn from failure.” He concludes that when something goes “bad” the natural reaction is to “become defensive, screen our criticism, and put the blame on anyone and everyone” else. This inability to look inward is problematic not only for the individual, but for a company. The multiplying effects of one’s blindness can hit a company hard, like a punch in the stomach.

When you have a strong self-sense of “success” then covering up “failures” is a common response. Power-welding politicians and Fortune 500 executives have driven home this point for decades. Argyris explains that one’s “high aspiration for success” is shared with “an equally high fear of failure and a propensity to feel shame and guilt when [people]…fail to meet their high standards.” Personal embarrassment and guilt feelings driven by sub-par performance encourages the individual to protect themselves and play the blame game. Repeated, this pattern of “self-serving” results in “self-sealing.” This self-imposed inoculation creates diminishing returns on your efforts. While you see yourself as perfectly balanced on the tightrope, the outside world sees you as out of balance and out of touch.

Defense posturing is self-defeating. By focusing outward instead of inward, individuals are shortchanging themselves for “being a catalyst for real change.” The carnage caused by Smart People with “brittle” personalities includes a predisposition against learning and being hypersensitive during performance evaluations, something the author refers to as “the doom loop.” In my own experience, it becomes impossible to build an effective team or a culture of collaboration when people are following their own paths of glory.

The author discusses techniques for how companies can teach their employees to “reason productively.” Interestingly, the author’s insight of 1991 mirrors research of 2008.  A SHRM white-paper “Workplace Visions” concludes the number one skill employers expect to increase in importance in the next five years is critical thinking and problem solving.

While Argyris pushes companies to help employees with productive reasoning, I feel the workforce has become more self-reliant since the early 90s. Today, more workers are independent knowledge brokers. Their self-reliance means they will have to shoulder the responsibility for achieving effective productive reasoning. The challenge will be to maintain a healthy ego while engaging in on-going, honest self-assessments. This starts with a willingness to welcome critical dialogue from the outside.

Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No. When I assist people in job transition, part of my challenge is to help people find their strengths and work through their shortcomings. Interviewing is rarely anyone’s strongest suit. Possibly, because they are in job transition and the future is fuzzy, they feel more vulnerable. With a little probing, a dialogue begins that might not otherwise have been possible. Their defense mechanisms are at ease.  This state of neutrality allows them to more quickly and more accurately come to a critical point of self-awareness and embrace new tools and concepts to help secure their next position. Once they pass over this threshold, then suddenly, many other doors become visible for exploration.

As the author concludes, when people are active participants in productive reasoning, “they are not just solving problems but developing a far deeper and more textured understanding of their role as members of the organization. They are laying the groundwork for continuous improvement that is truly continuous. They are learning how to learn.”

1. Traditional interviews demand time from multiple parties, impacting production activities
2. Most managers would rather do ANYTHING other than interview someone they have never met
3. Many managers have little to no training in the interview process
4. Many hiring decisions are seen as a 50/50 crap shot, no matter how much time you spend trying to analyze the candidate
5. Many hiring managers believe their intuition is the most valid measuring stick to make hiring decisions

The article supports the point of psychologist John Gottman, whose research in the dynamics of snap decisions and first impressions is discussed in Malcom Gladwell’s best-seller Blink. Gladwell explains how “thin slicing” videotaped interactions between married couples provided Gottman the ability to predict, with 95% accuracy, the long-term outcome of the marriage.

While Gottman is able to rationalize a relationship in a matter of seconds, Dr. Sullivan’s approach is more akin to speed dating, and suggests setting a time limit between 5 and 15 minutes for the interview. This caught my interest, because when I was conducting research for InterviewRX I found a study that concluded most hiring decisions are made between 4 and 10 minutes into the interview. This coalescing research suggests speed interviewing may be valid for some companies.

Sullivan points to several advantages of speed interviewing:

1. It provides for an immediate comparison between candidates. In the morning you can interview the slate of candidates and have an offer ready that afternoon.
2. Less time is spent with people you know you will never hire.
3. If available, you are able to interview more than 2 or 3 people with the best resumes.
4. Hiring managers are more willing to interview people if they know they can get in and out and on with their day.
5. Most hiring managers don’t enjoy a formal behavioral interview and prefer to go with their gut. Hiring managers are proud of their ability to ready body language and understand emotional nuances. They don’t need an hour to figure out if they can work with someone.
6. Speed interviewing appeals to college students and recent graduates.
7. Because of the time constraints, overly prepared candidates have to abandon their canned answers and respond off the cuff, providing the hiring manager with a truer assessment.

While speed interviewing is not yet fully embraced in HR and recruiting circles, there are enough companies using or experimenting with the concept to rethink your interview approach. From the hiring perspective, committing to a hiring decision after a ten-minute conversation is pretty gutsy, but one most of us do internally, even if we don’t make our decision “public” that soon.

Sullivan mentions that IBM, Abbott Labs and Texas Instruments are using Speed Interviewing, though no specifics are given. My personal opinion is that companies will be reluctant to embrace a snap judgment platform, but may follow the pattern used by Tower Consultants. An employee from Tower shares the company speaks with as many as fifty prospective candidates in a day, allotting about 5 minutes with each one. The speed interviewing is the first step. A more rigorous technical and behavioral interview follows before a hiring decision is made. In my own experience, initial phone interviews have become considerably shorter over the years. Today, I allow 5 to 7 minutes to capture essential qualifying information. From there, face-to-face interviews are scheduled.

The bottom line for Tower and a growing number of companies is that the “speed interviewing works” and I believe it will be a trend more and more people in job transition will experience.

The calculator provides a snap shop of how you currently invest a rare commodity, your time. The results are displayed in the form of a pie chart. The color diagram is what you know intuitively, but may not have thought about as competition for a slice of your 168-hour week.

With six areas competing for a slice of your week, it is difficult to keep all areas in balance. If your commute time is a larger slice of the pie than your leisure time, then you may want to consider ways of reallocating, such as “outsourcing” some of your chores to increase your leisure. You could talk to your boss about spending every Friday or every other Friday at home, instead of the office. Your commute time could then be redistributed to more hours of sleep or more leisure time. The calculator allows you to re-calibrate all of the times towards a more desired life/work balance.

The Solution
99% of participants in a 2007 study felt like the best remedy was to expose and teach students a variety of skills that would allow the U.S. to compete globally in the future. While there was a consensus of significant improvements needed in reading, science and math, employers had a bias towards applied skills such as critical thinking and problem solving, teamwork and collaborating, leadership and diversity.

Top 10
Here is the Top 10 list of skills employees are expected to need over the next five years

1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
2. Information Technology Application
3. Teamwork and Collaboration
4. Creativity and Innovation
5. Diversity
6. Leadership
7. Oral Communications
8. Professionalism and Work Ethics
9. Ethics and Social Responsibility
10. Written Communications

Action Plan for Job Seekers
During the interview process, job seekers can probe to find out what the company needs. What skills is the company lacking? What is impacting their competitiveness or slowing their growth? What critical elements are needed to complete their team? Chances are good the skill needed can be found on the Top 10 list. Think about your own strengths and experiences. What are your top two or three strengths that will add value to the company? Working with your strengths, develop brief concise stories you can share that will help the hiring manager “see” you as having expertise in these areas. If there is a solid match between their needs and the values you offer, then the hiring decision has just become an easy choice.

Once hired, learn more about which skills you will need for continued success.  Invest in continued education to hone your skills and erase any significant deficits that may impede your career growth. It is always better to be part of the solution rather than be perceived as part of the problem.