| Career management advice is a lot harder to evaluate than investment advice. There is no GAAP for how to craft a resume or dazzle an interviewer. So it's only natural that highly experienced career management experts sometimes voice conflicting opinions as to how a candidate should navigate this or that facet of the hiring process. And there is often no credible published research that can help settle the question. Having observed this time and again, I am reminded of a former boss's remark: "There are no rules, only guidelines." A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor, he was talking about the news-gathering process. Today his dictim strikes me as equally applicable to job-hunting.
Yes, there are things every job-seeker should do, and things no one should do. In between, however, lies a vast region of choices that might succeed in one situation but fall flat in another – and it's often impossible to predict the result in advance.
Solid preparation can help. For instance, while it's usually unwise to mention an unconventional hobby, you might score points if you've discovered your interviewer has the same hobby herself. Still, oftentimes a candidate is in the dark when weighing alternative answers or courses of action.
Views Differ
Take the post-interview thank-you message. You wouldn't think such a seeminly routine item could be a hot-button issue among career authorities. But it seems to be just that. Some coaches tout a hand-written, hard-copy thank-you note as an ace in the hole that can help any qualified candidate stand out from the pack. Others say an e-mail thank-you is timelier, more businesslike and more likely to reach its intended target (how many hiring managers open and read their own hard-copy mail?). While I find the second group's views far more compelling, it's clear there is no authoritative consensus on this question.
That tells me that neither I alone, nor JobsintheMoney's expert sources and writers, can resolve every major "best practices" question that job-seekers will face during the hiring and interview process. Some questions can be answered definitively, while for others the best anyone can do is explain the pros and cons – with each side's advocates named – so each job-seeker at least will have the means to make an informed decision.
Another challenge when acting as a gatekeeper and arbiter among career management experts is recognizing that chance plays a big part in any particular interview or application process. I often hear of instances where a job-seeking tactic that clearly was not a "best practice" - such as blast-mailing 500 identical resumes to target employers, or asking about compensation during an initial interview - ended in success. In such cases, the news media and many individual job-seekers are prone to wrongly draw a causal arrow, and pronounce a tactic sound because it appeared to work in this or that isolated case. My experience at JITM and eFC has taught me to view those as "outlier" results: successful outcomes achieved despite, rather than because of, the particular tactics used.
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