Is Your Tooth A Little Crooked (and other first impressions)

Yesterday someone deleted their JibberJobber account and said that JibberJobber was “really dated.”

I emailed the person back asking for more information, hoping that it wasn’t because of the layout and colors (less than a year ago we redid the layout), but I knew it is impossible to please everyone.

He said he only spend 15 minutes on JibberJobber, and found links to Monster and articles that were 5+ years old.

I wondered what he was talking about, and where he saw a link recommending Monster.  As you know, I’m not a big fan of job boards in a job search strategy.  On the Ask the Expert call this week Nick Corcodilos shared that Monster accounted for about 1.3% of jobs found, but companies spent more than $1B on it.  And I’m sure job seekers spend way more than 1.3% of their time on Monster.  I only promote Monster as a place to do “competitive intelligence research,” not as a place to waste time getting sucked into the resume black hole.

Where did he find a link promoting Monster??

Finally, we figured it out.  In the user-curated Library.  This is where JibberJobber users share links, books and articles that they have found useful in their job search.  Monster was at the top of the “job board” category, which is at the top of the Links page.

And that was it.  This person, who has a decent title at a huge company, judged JibberJobber and said it is dated, because there is a link to Monster.

Again, we can’t please everyone.  Earlier that day I was on the weekly user webinar and I got a lot of very positive feedback about JibberJobber, the job search organizer.

Look folks, I’m not in the business of providing links to you to Monster and Craigs List.  I figure you are an adult and you can find all the links you want.  We put the library in for job seekers to share gems they find online.  When I was in my job search I think 90% of the advice articles where garbage.  But if I found a gem (here’s one that is in the library: How to Write a Strong Value Proposition (by Jill Konrath)), I wanted to save it for me and share it with others.

If you judge JibberJobber by what others put in there… I can’t really help you.

This morning I’ve spent time cleaning out the library.  That means deleting useless junk, and adding descriptions to good stuff.

Here’s why I am sharing this with you.  You will have people JUDGE you based on completely trivial, non-important, irrelevant things.

Like what?

When I was a hiring manager I judged on (I’m not saying it was right to do this, but I think it is human nature.  If you think less of me, sorry.  But I guarantee others are judging you on the same, or similar):

Hair style. The girl who had the biggest hair I’ve seen in an interview… her hair was such a distraction (and the thing I remembered most) that, well, she didn’t get the job.  But she did make it into this blog post!

Short skirts. I don’t know if this girl thought a short skirt would be a benefit to her interview but the entire time my mind kept thinking one thing: SHE WON’T FIT INTO THIS COMPANY CULTURE.  It was a conservative company, and her skirt was too short when she was standing (much less when she was sitting).  Do I remember her interview responses?  No, and that obviously didn’t matter.  She didn’t make the short-list.

The suit. I remember interviewing a dozen university students for three internship positions.  ONE person wore a suit.  The rest didn’t take the time to dress up enough.  What should have been normal (dressing up) really stood out and made a favorable impression.

There are other things like choice of words, chewing gum and stuff I’m sure they didn’t think about when they were preparing for the interview.

But they got JUDGED on those things.

Here’s the truth: I was looking for someone who would make me look awesome.  Someone who would do a great job, fit into the company culture, be fun to work with and have around, and not be an embarrassment (in other words, someone we didn’t have to keep in a back room, away from the front desk where visitors might see him/her).

As an interviewer, I’m the JUDGE.  And a JUDGE makes JUDGEMENTS.  The judgement could be on your answer and how clever or experienced you are, but it usually can’t get there until the other things (big hair, gum smacking, choice of language, clothes) are non-issues.

I’m kind of sad that one person decided not to use JibberJobber because the Library (a very, very minor part of JibberJobber – I don’t even show that on the user webinar!) had a link to Monster.

But he was the judge.

Be careful, my friends, to not let something in your appearance or brand or first impression be “the monster” that keeps you from going to the next step in the process.

(Monster is now deleted from my Library :))