One of the benefits that comes with age and experience is wisdom. Older job seekers know that they have the benefit of life and specific industry and functional wisdom to offer employers. The challenge is that employers rarely actively and overtly hire for wisdom and maturity even if those attributes are what they need most.
Organizations generally hire for specific results. They need people who can make stuff (including delivering services), sell stuff or count stuff (including all types of administration). Today’s lean organizations have eliminated the layers of managers and bureaucrats that characterized the past. When defining staff needs today, managers need to justify their needs in the context of one of these three key functions. The impact on the job seeker is that she will experience the best results by defining her value in the context of one of those three key areas.
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Most job seekers, especially those with supervisory experience, position themselves as leaders. Their interviews are full of stories about how they got teams to get along, solved political challenges or convinced a more senior recalcitrant manager of a better solution. These are allusions to managing people for results. Of course, all organizations desperately need leaders at all levels, but today such “leaders” may be seen as overhead rather than essential.
By associating one’s primary value with actual revenue, product creation, service delivery or measurable administrative efficiency, an older job seeker associates himself with solutions that flow directly to the employer’s bottom line. Consider these comments from an interview or cover letter:
— “I was the top salesperson in my territory three out of four years and was top contributor throughout the whole company four times.”
— “By my re-engineering the inbound customer inquiry routing, we reduced customer wait times by 17 percent and customer satisfaction scores increased a comparable 21 percent.”
— “I was well-known for efficient administrative work. In fact, my claims processed efficiency score was in the top 20 percent of my department every month for three years.”
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These accomplishments are measurable, comprehensible and critical to organizational success.
Contrast those statements with what one typically hears at an older person’s interview:
— “People relied on me to keep things moving. I got along well with everyone and kept the environment positive and focused.” (This is good, but the hiring manager is likely looking for concrete results and not a friend or entertainer.)
— “I was well-known in the department because I had seen and solved most of the challenges that came up from time to time.” (This sort of institutional knowledge is critical in any organization, but how does the new hiring manager know it will translate to a new environment?)
— “As the most-tenured team member, I was able to tell others how things really worked.” (Again, no doubt a valuable role is described here, but it also makes the candidate seem like a seniority-focused “old salt” who might promulgate more negative than positive energy.)
Janet Jackson famously sang, “What Have You Done for Me Lately?” The adage, in a prospective manner, accurately describes what most hiring managers are thinking when they interview a candidate. Over the longer term, they know that a worker who is seasoned, experienced and, yes, wise, will be the most effective. But their focus tends to be on the short term.
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Think back to five or 10 years ago. Most can’t remember who made a hiring decision that was responsible for today’s valuable high performer. By contrast, if you consider who advocated for a new hire who did not thrive at the company two to six months ago, you can probably remember clearly. This is the conservatism that drives decision-making in hiring at most companies. Hiring managers and talent acquisitions managers often fear what can go wrong more than they seek what can go right. As a result, the hiring decision process focuses more on the short-term measurable expectations of making, selling or counting stuff rather than the long-term abstractions of wisdom, leadership and affability.
The effective older job seeker will, therefore, market him or herself as one who can make, sell or count better than other candidates. Armed with personal insights and anecdotes that can prove this point in the context of the hiring need, the older job seeker will experience increased measures of workplace success commensurate with his or her ability to add value as an employee.
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Experienced Workers Sell Wisdom. Employers Buy Expected Results originally appeared on usnews.com
