I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: Success Secrets Every Gutsy Girl Should Know (5 page)

I can’t tell you how many cover letters I’ve received over the years that make it sound as if I’m just another girl in a bar, er, I mean another name on a long list. You need to customize each letter so the person knows you’re writing to him and him alone. Don’t feel guilty if over time you end up showering a whole bunch of people with the same amount of admiration. No one will sue you for doing so.

Second, I love a candidate who seems real. Relax and let your personality come through. Here’s a sentence that hooked me—from a cover letter I received a few years ago. It was for an internship, but it could just as easily have been in a cover letter for an entry-level job.

“My favorite afternoons,” the letter writer told me, “are spent in mismatched pajamas, coffee in hand, flipping through the glossy pages of
Cosmo.”

She had me at mismatched pajamas. It sounded so authentic, and I could even picture her in my mind. I definitely wanted to meet her. Of course, you wouldn’t want to start talking about your jammies in a letter to a law firm or the State Department, but you should still find appropriate ways for the real you to shine through.

Last, you need to let me know what you’re going to do for me. Take a look at this excerpt from a letter I received recently, and tell me what’s wrong with it:

“Since graduating I’ve taken some time off to travel and write. I want to work for a company I’m excited about and step outside my comfort zone for a change. I’ve looked at all my options, and I feel that
Cosmo
is
the
place I desire to work.”

What’s wrong with this letter is that it screams “ME, ME, ME.” But prospective employers don’t give a rat’s ass about your need to be excited or step outside of your comfort zone or fulfill your desires. We want to know what you can do for
us
! What skills have you learned so far that you can bring to the company or organization? (FYI: we also don’t want to read spoiled-sounding statements, such as one suggesting that you just spent three months in Aix-en-Provence with your laptop and plenty of rosé!)

Some additional advice from Terri Wein: brevity is key. She suggests that you summarize your credentials in just two lines.

A Little Trick for Aerobicizing the Process

No matter how methodical you are about your search and no matter how many leads you explore, there will be lulls in the action, possibly even times when you feel as if you’re stuck in some horrible doldrums and sense that absolutely nothing is ever going to happen.

One of the best things you can do then is to work at something. No, you don’t have a job yet, but you can volunteer someplace, offer to be a free intern (or the free assistant to a writer or artist), create a website or blog (not about yourself but an interesting, relevant topic). The talent manager Sue Leibman, the president of Barking Dog Entertainment, and I were once discussing how Hollywood actors keep their careers alive, and she mentioned that when her clients are in lulls, she encourages them to take whatever work that’s offered. “Work begets work,” she said. “It just does.”

When you are out there, doing things and meeting people, it’s as though this weird law of physics takes hold—and a job could easily find its way to you.

In a study with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) that I initiated at
Cosmo
, 70 percent of respondents said that they felt an unpaid internship in your field carries more weight than a paying job in an area unrelated to your field. If you need to pay bills by, let’s say, waitressing, you could try to find an internship to work at during your off-hours.

Special Advice for Gen Y

If you’re a member of Gen Y, you probably always got plenty of attention from adults while you were growing up, but you have to be careful about assuming that you’re on the same playing field as the people you interview with. Lately someone I work with was setting up an interview with a job candidate and the young woman told her, “I’m fine at two. Does that work for you?”
Wrong.
She should have first found out what worked for the interviewer.

Recite after me: “My time and needs are not as important as the interviewer’s.”

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Know What They Know About You
}

I
’m sure you’re aware that some companies check out job candidates online before they even consider hiring them. But you may not realize how many companies now do this and how extensive their sleuthing is. In a survey of recruiters in the United States, 75 percent reported that their companies have formal policies in place that require hiring personnel to research applicants online. And a whopping 90 percent regularly google candidates to see what they can find out at a glance. Forty-six percent say they’ve uncovered digital deal-breakers, such as ethics violations, that forced them to eliminate a candidate from consideration.

And what a recruiter considers bad behavior may be tame in your eyes. In a careerbuilder.com survey, more than half of the employers who chose not to hire someone because of an online revelation did so because of provocative photos (in some instances this was simply a picture of the candidate in a bikini). Forty-four percent said their decision had been based on a reference to drinking or drugs. And get this: some even were turned off by poor online communication skills.

You must be ruthlessly diligent about the information that is available about you online. It’s important to have a presence—on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. After all, you don’t want to seem like someone who was kidnapped by aliens five years ago and just brought back to Earth. But you need to control what goes onto the Internet, monitor it, and do your best to bury anything that is negative.

Start by making sure your privacy settings on sites such as Facebook are in place. Be sure, too, that information that appears about you online is consistent. If your LinkedIn profile is even slightly different from the résumé you send out, it’s going to make a prospective employer wonder.

Before you begin a job hunt, Jane Buckingham, the CEO of Trendera and author of
The Modern Girl’s Guide to Sticky Situations
, recommends that you do a Google search on yourself and see what turns up. You should also sign up for a Google alert on your name so that you are always aware of what’s being posted about you.

If you find anything negative, you unfortunately can’t erase it, but you can make it harder to find. One strategy is start a blog and frequently create new content. Search engines rank the most recent and frequent results first, so your blog will show up at the top and a negative story will move lower and lower. (Companies such as ReputationDefender use similar tactics.)

Speaking of blogs, they’re fine to do and can enhance your online profile, but you need to make yours professional in nature. “Personal blogs can really lead to problems,” Buckingham says. “Lots of personal information doesn’t appeal to many employers.”

Your blog should carry info related to your field: links to important articles, for instance, or insights from a talk you attended.

There are two other important points to keep in mind. First, “It’s not just about what
you
do with information about yourself,” Buckingham says. “It’s about what
others
do with it. Today it’s all about the power of the send.”

Let’s say you go to a Halloween party dressed as Snooki. You have no intention of posting a picture of yourself in the costume. But a friend might take one and tag it. Watch out for anyone snapping photos. If you see a questionable shot of yourself on someone’s Facebook wall, ask him or her to take it down immediately. Better yet, don’t ever dress like Snooki!

Second, be sure to understand how social media sites work. When you check someone out on LinkedIn, for example, it will alert him or her to the fact that you’ve done that. Do you want people to know that kind of stuff? If not, make yourself anonymous under your profile view setting. When you update your LinkedIn profile, it will send an alert to anyone who is following you, which could signal to an employer that you’re ready to look for a new job. So you might want to disable that feature as well.

Of course, there’s also good, old-fashioned word of mouth to be conscious of. If, for instance, you develop a reputation for being difficult, bitchy, or indecisive, people will hear about it soon enough.

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How to Nail a Job Interview
 
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O
ver the course of running five magazines, I’ve interviewed hundreds of job candidates. When someone dazzles me during an interview and I find myself thinking, “
Yes
, this is the one,” it’s almost as if a chemical reaction has taken place. Fortunately, if you’re the one being interviewed, it’s possible to
create
that chemical reaction.

First, though, you have to be a good fit for the job. No matter how brilliantly you come across during an interview, a smart employer won’t want to bring you on board if your skills and experience level aren’t right. Not long after I arrived at
Cosmo
, I made it mandatory for all editorial assistant candidates to take a writing test before they were even granted an interview—because if you can’t master
Cosmo
-speak, you won’t thrive at the magazine. A new job should always be a stretch, but not such a stretch that you’re destined to bomb at it.

So if you’re right for the job, here are the strategies that will leave an interviewer panting to hire you.

Own the First Five Minutes

After I arranged for
Cosmo
to team up with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), we surveyed five hundred of its members to determine what they were looking for during a job interview. Here’s a stat that really grabbed my attention: almost 35 percent said they had made the decision
not
to hire someone in about five minutes. Though it may be hard to tell if a candidate is a perfect fit in such a short amount of time, the interviewer can often quickly decide whether the person is simply all wrong in his opinion. My God, I thought, you’ve barely had time to step into the room, shake hands, and will your sweat glands into submission before your fate has already been decided.

Many HR managers said they gave a person more time than that, but I suspect that some of them didn’t want to admit to how quickly they sized up a candidate. Plus, remember that HR managers are trained to be open-minded. When you meet with a prospective boss, he or she may react less neutrally. I know I develop a feel about a person very, very quickly—and I don’t fight it.

The bottom line: the early minutes of an interview are critical. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the interviewer is giving you a chance to warm up and get your bearings. He isn’t. He’s judging you. He’s deciding whether you’re a good choice. Here’s what you need to pay attention to so that you own those first minutes and make the very most of them.

Your appearance.
I’ll never forget my very first job interview in Manhattan. Though I was pretty sure I wanted to be in magazines, a contact arranged a meeting for me with the owner of a small advertising agency and I jumped at it, thinking that at the very least I would gain some practice at presenting myself. As the interview was drawing to a close, the arrogant, cocky owner leaned back in his chair and said, “I think this could work. But you’ll have to get the stain out of your dress first.”
Ouch.
I was so humiliated that I never followed up on his offer for me to take the discussion to the next level, but it taught me how closely people pay attention to your appearance.

You need to make sure your hair, makeup, nails, clothes, and shoes all look impeccable (see “Success Style: 10 Easy Steps” for more specifics). Go very, very light on cologne or skip it altogether (it’s a real turn-off for some people). Do
not
flash cleavage (unless you’re applying for a job at Hooters) or wear clothes that are too short or too tight. In the
Cosmo
survey, 95 percent of the HR managers said that dressing provocatively was a big problem and 67 percent said it would be an outright deal breaker.

How dressy should you be? Years ago there was a uniform you could wear for a job interview—a boring suit—and it worked in a huge variety of fields. That look makes sense today only in very conservative settings (thank God!), and you need to customize your interview outfit to the field you’re applying in. For instance, if you’re gunning for a job as a publicist, you may want to make a statement with a trendy accessory and great shoes to show you’re in the loop with what’s hot. And if you’re applying for a job as a teacher, you’ll want to show you can dress for the principal and parents as well as the kids—so look polished, for instance in a nice pants suit with a great scarf.

Of course, since you don’t work at the place, you can’t be expected to know the dress code firsthand. But you can check out the company’s website, watch people going into the building, ask anyone you know who once worked there. Then take it up
at least
a notch for the interview. For instance, a top IT director told me that she’d expect any woman applying for a job in IT to be dressed in a blouse, jacket, skirt, or pants, even though she might wear jeans on the job.

Your body language.
From the time I was in my twenties I’ve been writing, editing, and publishing articles about how people use body language to communicate, often without realizing they’re doing so. It can speak volumes and is often far more accurate than what’s being said verbally. You’ll have the upper hand if you not only learn how to read it but use your own strategically.

Of course, when you’re interviewing for a job, you’ve got a lot of balls to keep in the air, and you may feel the last thing you can do is concentrate on your body language. But you’ll come across far more confidently if you’re conscious of certain details. I learned about many of them from Janine Driver, a body language expert I’ve worked with frequently and the author of
You Can’t Lie to Me: The Revolutionary Program to Supercharge Your Inner Lie Detector and Get to the Truth.