Episode 25 – It’s Never OK to Kiss the Interviewer with Jane Sunley

July 19, 2015 Podcast

Welcome to the 25th episode of the Graduate Job Podcast.

This week I speak with Jane Sunley, best-selling author and CEO of people engagement specialists, Purple Cubed. We cover a wide range of topics in this episode, from looking at where you are currently in your career journey, the importance of your values and why you need to be spending some time thinking about them, why and how you should go about getting a career mentor, through to top tips to make your job application stand out! No matter where you are currently in your job search, this is an episode you won’t want to miss!

You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Additionally, you can subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher Radio or Soundcloud.

MORE SPECIFICALLY IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

  • The career cycle and how to understand where you are on it
  • Why mentors can play an important part of your job search
  • How to go about finding a job and career mentor
  • Why and how you should channel your inner cheerleader
  • The importance of following job application instructions
  • Why 90% of job applications fail
  • Why it is never ok to kiss the interviewer

SELECTED LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Transcript – Graduate Job Podcast #25 – It’s Never OK to Kiss the Interviewer with Jane Sunley

James:  A very warm welcome today to Jane Sunley, bestselling author of Purple Your People and It’s Never Ok to Kiss the Interviewer; and also, founder and CEO of people engagement specialist of Purple Cubed.

Jane, a very warm welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast.

Jane:     Thank you very much, James. It’s very lovely to be here.

James:  So before we dive into the episode today, would you like to tell us a little bit more about what it is you do at Purple Cubed and how you became an author and CEO?

Jane:    Yeah. So, you know how companies tend to really complicate all of their HR and people and it’s just not the simplest it could be, but what our job is is to simplify all of that, make sure it’s all joined up and then make sure that the things that HR and people do will impact the bottom line. So instead of having, kind of — people always talk about HR like tissues and issues, and cabinets full of policies and all of that. This is about business savvy, very practical tools that will enable companies to be the best place to work and have happy employees which therefore will be more engaged and therefore will be more productive. So we’ve got a software business and a kind of consultancy which we called Enabling which is how we help people to deliver the things that we suggest they do.

James:  Wow, excellent. I like the tissues and issues. I have not heard that one before.

Jane:    Sometimes people say HR is human remains; don’t they? We won’t be that rude.

James:  And today we’re going to go into detail for your great — I love the title for the book — It’s Never Okay to Kiss the Interviewer: And Other Secrets to Surviving, Thriving and High Fiving at Work.

Jane:     Yep.

James:  Today we’re going to go into it more detail for some of the topics from it but before we start, what was the motivation, Jane, for writing the book?

Jane:     Well, I wrote my first book that was a very comprehensive yet easy to use guide to be in a great place to work and having done that — and the book did quite well and sold quite well and lots of people called it their HR bible and things — I thought I need to do the other side of the coin now and write a book for people to be successful and happy at work because if you put the two together, then life should be marvellous; shouldn’t it?   So that was my attempt, if you like, to just make people think about what would actually make them happy, engaged, et cetera, at work, rather than doing perhaps, you know, not really thinking it through and just doing what they thought everybody else thinks they should do. Does that make sense?

James:  Nah, definitely. And from lots of people I coach the overriding feeling is definitely going with the flow and just —

Jane:     Absolutely.

James:  –rather than proactively planning their career.

Jane:     Exactly.

James:  It’s just things that come along just attached to them.

Jane:     And I’ll tell you what started this book up, the title, what sparked it off really because I’d been thinking, oh, I really ought to do that and I was — very quickly — I was giving a lecture to some masters degree students in Oxford and it was a Q&A basically and somebody put his hand and said, if the interviewer is a lady, is it okay if I give her a kiss? And of course I said, absolutely not, under no circumstances, and just thought, goodness, I think I need to tell people the basics here. So that’s what kick started it, what made me sit down the next day and write it.

James:  It would have been interesting if someone tried to give the interviewer a kiss. When I’ve been on the panel recruiting–

Jane:     Well, exactly.

James:  –it wouldn’t have gone well.

Jane:     But what a weird question to ask.

James:  So you talk at the beginning of the book about the career cycle and deciding where you are and what’s next.

Jane:     Yes.

James:  Would you like to explain, you know, what is the career cycle and how listeners can understand where they are on it?

Jane:     Yes. I will. I wrote this book for anybody at any age but it has had great graduate uptake, obviously because I guess finding a job is probably more personal to them than anybody. But I think your career starts as early as when you start school and even before, you know, when your mom says, what do you want to be? And you say, oh, I’m going to be a fireman or whatever. You’re not going to start really say what you’re thinking about as a career but between that stage and perhaps going to university, there are a whole lot of years where you might want to start forming thoughts and I think it’s really important to observe those thoughts. So you might say, well, I’m in education. I’m nowhere near actually doing my career but let me start thinking about what I really want to do. And what tends to happen traditionally is that everybody goes, oh, I think you should do this; or why don’t you do that? You know, career teachers, parents, friends, everybody you know has always got a suggestion for you. So I think it’s really important to say, am I in those bits when I’m just warming my thoughts? I’m in a part where I’m very serious, I know what I want to do so I’m going to pick my courses or my micro study accordingly. Or am I in a job that I’m happy; not happy? Am I in a role I want to be in? Am I in the environment I want to be in? So in the book there’s a kind of bit of a diagram over two pages where it just makes you think about where am I now and then let’s look at the next stage, is where do I want to be because as with anything, if you know where you are now and where you want to get to, then you can start filling the gap in the middle.

James:  I loved in the book, and I wasn’t aware of this, the word “career” comes from the French word “carriere”?

Jane:     Yes.

James:  Meaning road?

Jane:     Yes. So you’re on the road and people — I mean I called the superhighway in the book because it’s more than a road, but you know, you are on the road and if you think about it as a journey, you know, you wouldn’t kind of necessarily do the whole journey in one month. You wouldn’t set out in a journey if you didn’t know where you were going, probably — maybe if you’re backpacking thing you’d go where life takes you — but so it’s important to think about it as a voyage, really.

James:  And you talk about the need, well the importance of starting with the end result in mind.

Jane:     Yes.

James:  What questions can graduates be asking themselves to think about the end point?

Jane:     Well, I think I would say, what do I like doing? What do I enjoy? What makes me happy? Because, you know, if you’re 20 — I don’t want to depress everybody — but you may have 50 years of work ahead of you.

James:  That is depressing.

Jane:     Therefore you need to be happy for most of that time, if not all of it. And I know people who have been working for 40 years and aren’t happy at all. That’s just ridiculous. So I’m on this mission to say, people are allowed to be happy at work. People constantly say to me, you’re not supposed to be happy at work. Of course you are. So starting with the end in mind is not about having a very fixed view about what the actual job is or what the actual company is. It’s about saying what sort of environment or what sort of role would allow me to use my strengths, the things that make me happy, the things that interests me. I think that generation Y and Z certainly, will be more and more aware of the fact that they want to be happy and they want to do things they enjoy. They’re not going to be wage slaves in inverted commas. They’re going to be fulfilled people who are making a great contribution. So, just think about the sorts of things and then you can start working out where you want to be eventually and how you’re going to get there.

James:  And you also talk about how too often people are moving away from something as opposed to moving towards something else and looking back at my early career moves, it was true. It was, I didn’t really like that so I’ll try not to do much of that.

Jane:     Yeah.

James:  It was moving away as opposed to moving forward.

Jane:     Yeah. A week after constant work sometimes and we say, why do you want to come to work here? And they say, because I hate where I am now or I can’t stand my boss and that’s not a reason to go towards something. You know, I want people to say, I want to come here because you’re a great place to work. Or I want to come here because you’ve got a great opportunity to develop this, or whatever it happens to be and I think if you trying to get away from something, you need to sit and think really, really hard about what it is that you want instead because otherwise you’re going to have a whole lot of time of unhappiness evading things and never really finding the thing that makes you happy and that needs a bit of thinking, really. Everybody owes it to themselves to give themselves some time just to consider what that might be instead of rushing into it or as we say, moving away from it all the time.

James:  And linked then to the happiness and being happy at work, how important then do you think values are, people’s personal values, in terms of the work they should be doing?

Jane:     Two things, I think. First of all it’s important to know what your own values are and people go, what does that mean? Your values are the things that are important to you in life, at work, and so on and so forth. So for instance, it might be freedom. It might be having fun at work. It might be money. It might be having structure. So, as a simple example, if you want really good structure, don’t go work in a small entrepreneurial business where everybody mucks in and it’s quite unstructured.   And ditto, you know, if you want freedom don’t go and work for a very, very structured environment because you’re not going to be happy. And on my website, janesunley.com, there’s a free tool which we will never hassle you or contact you or anything, it’s just to make the world a better place, really but there’s a free values tool that you can go and prioritize your values. It takes about 10 minutes or so. Once you know what your own values and what’s important to you are, then you can start to look for an environment or a company that aligns with your values. And it’s almost like when you go for an interview you’re going to be interviewing them in a way as much as they’re interviewing you. And those are the kinds of things you want to find out, will I be able to fulfil my own values within this organization; so, so important.

And I will just mention that when I do coaching and I do a manual version, or I used to before I had it online, about eliciting people’s values, the things that they think of last usually when we put them into priority order end up being on the top of the list. So it’s not always in the front of your mind the things that really, really matter and that’s why you need to sit and give it some thought.

James:  That’s interesting. And the links to the value checker will be on the show notes so I’ll link to them. I did it myself this morning and it was interesting. I talked with Jane before we started recording and one of the options it was money or fun and I was looking at the screen thinking, hum, what am I more interested in? And it’s, you know, difficult decisions like that because you can, if you go for a job which might be cool and great fun but if you’re very low paid or not getting paid, the two values might be then in competition.

Jane:     Yeah.

James:  It can be difficult.

Jane:     Of course these things will evolve over time. I mean, you should probably do it once a year, really, because it might be that right now you live in a home with your parents or the money is less important so you go for the fun but it might be in a few years time you want to move out or, I don’t know, find a partner, have a baby or whatever, and then money becomes more important. So I think it’s important to keep reviewing this because it changes.

James:  So once people have got their values and they know they’re prioritized and they’ve got an idea of what they really, their core values are, how then would they, should they begin to start using them in their job search?

Jane:     Well, I think, some people have a bit in mind of what they want to know. But I know an awful lot of people that have got their….what they want to do, sorry. There’s an awful lot of people have no idea about what they want to do. So in that case, that’s about saying, okay, there are my values. Now let me think about what I’m good at and what strengths I’ve got and what experience I’ve got, what I can do with it and I wouldn’t get too hung up on the actual job title but then if you go and start to research companies, you should be able to see from their websites and Google searching and all the rest of it, what they’re values are. You’re able to see from the tone. Some of them, great, put them on the website, fantastic.   They tick. You should probably give priority to those companies who have defined the values and are out there saying, this is what we’re about. This is what we stand for because it’s quite easy then to say, yeah, I would really fit in there or do you know what, I’m not interested in a company like that. So, if you can find a company that’s quite transparent, then that really helps. And if not, as I say, just for the signs. If you go on the website and it looks very, very corporate and all the rest of it, if those sort of values are in your value set, then great, go work in the corporate environment. If it’s very cool and fun and a bit laid back and a bit funky and all the rest of it, then maybe that fits your value set. So it’s very important to find an environment in which you can thrive and survive because you might be the best most talented employee in the world but if you’re in the wrong environment, you’re going to bomb and that happens all the time. And then people lose confidence and it ruins their careers. So think about environment.

James:  You mention in the book about how you have a values mentor at work. What does he do?

Jane:     We do. We have, well, we share, we’ve got eight values at work which is quite a lot, really, but it’s important to us that we are very clear about what we are. So we’ve got an overall values mentor who’s somebody who from the very first day, the only person I’ve ever interviewed who when I said to him in the interview, what do you know about our values, he wrote them all out and told me exactly what they were and I thought if you can work here you should be our values mentor. So he’s kind of the overall one and then there is different people in the company are responsible for keeping the values alive. So one of ours is about achievements, for instance. So we measure outputs rather than inputs. So we don’t go, what are you doing today? It’s more about what did you achieve today. So the values mentor for achievement is you know, all of the conversations will be about how is that going to help us towards the goal? How is that going to help us achieve? And we’ve got lots of fun — one of our values is fun — we’ve got lots of mentors for that, as you can imagine.   But it’s just I want people in my business, only 25 of us, but we want our people to keep that alive and to make sure that anyone that comes in is very immersed in our values. And when we interview them we look them in the eye and say, look, these are our values. Can you 100 percent commit to supporting those values because if you can’t, don’t come here; and it’s just kind of as simple as that, really.

James:  So great example of someone doing the homework and doing the research and proper research into a company before the interview and it paying off.

Jane:     So important. I was so impressed, honestly. I’d given that guy a job even if he probably didn’t have any skills at all because he cares enough to go and learn what they are and look at it, you know –that happened years ago — and he’s still there now and he’s done really well with us. So it just goes to show, doesn’t it?

James:  Yes, definitely. You talk in the book also about mentoring and the value, the importance of getting a mentor. Why is a mentor important to job seekers?

Jane:     I think it’s important because if you have someone who is in your corner, who is not your mom, maybe your mom might be your mentor, but I think it’s useful to have somebody outside of the personal kind of arena and someone who’s going to help you because they’re a nice person and they want to give back but they’ve got some relevance, either experience or knowledge or can ask good questions. I think it just helps to have a bit of a sounding board sometimes and what, in my experience, tends to happen because I mentor a lot of grads, post grads, they ask about 10 people for their opinions and they get very confused because they get lots of conflicting information. And I think if you can get one person that you really trust to help you balance things off, not to tell you what to do, to ask you the right questions and nurture around it, it helps because if you ask too many people that’s why so many people don’t know what they want to do because they ask 10 people and they get 10 different answers and then they just end up more confused than when they started, really. So I think mentoring helps to hone it down a bit and there’s a lot of people out there with really good knowledge. So you may as well suck it up, I think, and take it in and benefit from it.

James:  Definitely. And how would you recommend people go about finding a mentor? I mean, you mentioned you’ve got 10.

Jane:     Yeah. I think I’d start with, you know, who do you know and what people, which people do, the people you now know know and who do you admire and is there anybody that you think, wow, that’s a career I’d like to have. And it is quite interesting that if you ask people, I find, the more successful and further up the ladder they are, they’re likely to help you or they’re help you find someone. So I’ll give you a real life example. My daughter is studying criminal psychology and she wrote to a very eminent criminal psychologist in New Zealand and said, you know, if I do this would you mind being a bit of a mentor? You know, you don’t have to meet me but if I could kind of email with you or whatsup with you or whatever, and this woman said, yeah, absolutely. I’m happy to do that. And when she asked her I said, oh, I’m sure she’ll never do it, and she did because people want to give back and want to be helpful. So, always ask, aim high. If they say no, it doesn’t matter. Just move on to somebody else or as I say, they might know someone that can help you. So, a lot of people admire and go, well how did you do it? Okay, life is different. They will give you some hints and tips at least.

James:  If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Jane:     Yep, absolutely.

James:  So how does a mentor differ from a coach?

Jane:     A coach is usually somebody who hasn’t got the relevant experience in the, you know, if you want to go into banking, your mentor might have banking experience. Your coach may have no banking experience, but will just be very skilled in questioning some of your end goals, helping you to work out how you’re going to get there. A coach is, in my experience, they’re usually paid for. So if you’ve got plenty of money and you want to invest in a coach, that’s great. Mentors will usually do it for free. So, I’d say, obviously, try for a mentor first, really. I think, you know, you might want to use a coach if there was some particular sticking issue that you wanted to get over or you needed to deal with something that hadn’t gone well, or whatever but I think I’d go for the mentoring option if possible, really. Maybe when you get into business and you’re, you know, in a job then they’ll come to people like me and you James, and we’ll coach them.

James:  Nah, definitely. I’m always available.




Jane:     Yeah.

James:  They’ll get in touch.   So moving on to experience, I loved your comment in the book that you should view everything in the contexts of how could this be useful to me at work. So what would you suggest are the best ways people can go about finding experience and using it effectively?

Jane:     I think it’s important to find some sort of work experience, whatever it is and there’s a story in the book about somebody I know who — very, very bright, super bright math graduate — took a job in the summer sticking labels on bottles which is like the most boring job ever and he thought it was dreadful when he first started but actually the camaraderie of the team who were all sticking the labels on the bottles all day repetitively hour in, hour out really taught him loads about team dynamics, about motivation. You know, they used to have competitions, who could stick the most labels on and get the least crooked ones and who can do them the fastest and just all of this kind of bantery camaraderie stuff, just taught him so much about how to deal with a fairly mundane task and not feel de-motivated and it was like a massive learning thing. And when he first went there he said this will be no good whatsoever for my future career but of course, it is because he learned all of those other bits. So don’t think of the experience as the task. Think of the experience, about all the things that are going on around you and so, you could, you know, volunteer, go and work experience — I don’t know — join the football team. Any of those things where you’re interacting with other people and working towards some sort of end result will be relevant to whatever your chosen career is, if you tell it in the right way. So if sticking labels on bottles is not going to be helpful for a career in accounting, but you could say, well, you know, I know a lot about team dynamics because — and if you illustrate how you can use your experience in the employer’s context, that’s a massively strong thing. So go work in a burger bar and learn about customer service, about resilience, about time management, about delegation, all of those things and then translate it into your chosen career.

James:  Completely agree. There’s always, there’s always something you can get from each experience, whether sweeping the streets.

Jane:     Absolutely, and it just shows that you’re prepared to get up and do it, really. If people applied to me, however qualified they are, I need them to have done something and been out there and you know, just turned up and done it and been reliable and all of that.

James:  Thinking more personally then about your company and when you’re recruiting, what is it you look for in candidates and graduates that apply to you? How can people stand out?

Jane:     Well, we have quite a specific way of recruiting in that we ask them to write 10 bullet points about why they’re the right person to work for us and a one page CV. And I’ll tell you now, over 90 percent of the people who apply do neither of those things. So they get rejected because if you can’t follow an instruction, then it tells me you don’t really want to do it and you’re just chucking out CVs or you’re not going actually do as you’re asked when you get there. And then the stand out thing for us are people who can write, so they can think cohesively. It’s not they’re having to write in the job. It’s just about how to think logically. We need people who’ve got a great attitude, who smile a lot, who work because they want to be there. We’re not terribly hung up on having millions of skills apart from, you know, techs. Obviously you have to be able to have technical skills but we can teach most of it and it’s more about having the right attitude, doing your homework and having thought about it before the exam, researched a little bit, come with some suggestions. You know, if you turn up and say, you know, I could really help your business by doing X, Y and Z that’s a massively strong thing. So, don’t just sit there and be passive. Make sure you’ve done a lot of proactive thinking before you get there.

James:  So it’s interesting you say that 90 percent of people just don’t follow the instructions. So what do they send, two page CVs?

Jane:     They send 10 page CVs and a massive long letter or massive long email, or whatever. And no, we don’t want to read all that. We’re not about all that. We’re about simplifying. One of our values is make it simple. So we have to have people who can do that, otherwise it’s not going to work.

James:  No, definitely and within the templates are you open to anything?

Jane:     Yeah.

James:  Or people can be —

Jane:     Yeah. People write in purple sometimes because we’re called Purple Cubed and you know, sometimes they’re really long bullets. We’d like a short one, really but some people are quite funny. It just says such a lot more about the personality than if they’re writing you a standard, I would like to apply for this job. I am passionate and ambitious. I mean, everybody says that. Of course you expect to be passionate and ambitious. We want people who can stand out from the crowd by saying something different or even doing something different.   We have on the video 10 points once before. It’s just kind of different, didn’t really get too excited about it but it’s not about the contents than the delivery, really.

James:  You said as long as people are doing their homework, doing the research and putting some care and attention in, then that’s a win.

Jane:     Exactly, which is why it’s never a good idea to send out a 100 identical CVs to 100 jobs. You best to do research, find some places that you really want to work and then put some energy and effort into impressing those few people than just chucking it out there because you’re not going to stand out if you send out standard stuff. You have to show that you’ve read up about it, that you’ve been on the website, that you’ve looked really into the job and that you’re explaining exactly why you want to work there in particular, why you want that job in particular and if you don’t do that, they’re just going to chuck your CV in the bin. I mean, I’ve seen it so many times.

James:  I completely agree and it always makes me laugh in the paper when every so often when you see the picture of some sad looking graduate, you know, with, I have applied for 200 jobs and had 200 rejections.

Jane:     Exactly.

James:  And you think, well you know, maybe instead of applying to 200, if you’d apply to 10 and done it properly.

Jane:     Yeah, and do it really well, exactly, and stand out from the crowd, yeah, absolutely.

James:  So time is running away from us, Jane, but before we go to the quick fire question round, just wanted to, one final question, this time on positivity. I love the comment in the book about the need to stay positive and to channel your inner cheerleaders. Could you explain what you meant by this?

Jane:     Well, I think it can be very disheartening looking for a job. I know. I’ve been there years ago and rejection is never good and so I think part of staying positive is trying to get some feedback on why they didn’t want you in the first place. Not all people will do that, particularly big companies don’t like to do it. Small companies normally will. But I think it’s just about finding the way to go, you know, I am going to get a job. I will get there eventually. And if they don’t want me, then it wasn’t right for me. I wasn’t right for them or they weren’t right for me. So, it’s kind of about saying, instead of saying, I didn’t get that job, it’s terrible; it’s about going, well you know what, it’s their loss. I’m going to go and move on to somewhere else and you need to get some inner resilience for that otherwise you get all the people around you going, oh, never mind. Oh, it just makes you feel worse. So you do have to kind of channel a bit of inner strength and that’s maybe where your mentor could help, or you know, a good friend who you can go and have a good laugh about it because as soon as you get down it will show in your interview. I’ve interviewed people who said, well, I’ve been out of work six months now and they’re really down on their luck and all the rest of it and they look so miserable. And that’s not going to get you a job, unfortunately. You can’t get a job out of sympathy. So you have to find some strengths and be positive.

James:  Very wise words there. So, shifting gears now, moving on to the quick fire question round, Jane, what one book would you recommend to our listeners to read?

Jane:     Right. You might think this is a bit weird and a bit miserable, but going back to the positivity thing I think you can think there’s always someone worse off than you, it helps you to get through these things. So there is this brilliant book by Lyn Smith called, Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust and it’s stories of people who were interned in concentration camps, et cetera, and survived. And although you think this might be the most miserable book in the world, it’s full of stories of courage and strength and resilience and hope and survival and I always think, you know, whenever anything awful happens to me, and it does in your career, occasionally things go wrong and you know, you could really just give up and think, oh, no. You just think, they were a billion times of worse than I will ever be and those people came out of there and built fantastic lives and have children and careers and all the rest of it. So, I would recommend that book for just putting in perspective actually how bad things get, but they’ll probably never going to get that bad.

James:  That’s a good idea. It’s not one I’ve come across.

Jane:     No, it’s a weird choice.

James:  No, not at all. It’s, you said, it’s always good to have perspective of other people.

Jane:     Yeah.

James:  And puts things, makes things easier.

Jane:     It stops you saying, poor me, I tell you.

James:  And what one website would you recommend, Jane?

Jane:     Well, I think the obvious one is you’ve got to all get on LinkedIn, really, because if you’re not on LinkedIn, it’s going to be so much more difficult for you to network and if people are on there, they’re on there because they’re willing to be networked with. Obviously I’d recommend my own website and my own book because there’s stuff there that really will help. So I guess between my website and LinkedIn you might be all right, really.

James:  Yep and I linked to both in the show notes.

Jane:     Okay.

James:  As you mentioned LinkedIn, we talked earlier about mentors. A great way to find yourself a mentor is to–

Jane:     Absolutely–

James:  –approach people on LinkedIn.

Jane:     Absolutely. Yeah.

James:  And finally, Jane, what one tip can listeners implement today to help them in their job search?

Jane:     My one tip is just to remember that you are allowed to be happy at work and always remember that.

James:  I think that’s a brilliant point to end the interview on. As you said, 50 years is a long time to work, especially five days a week, long hours. So make sure you’re somewhere where you’re happy.

Jane:     Absolutely.

James:  Jane, what is the best way that people can get in touch with you and the work that you do?

Jane:     Well, you can follow me on Twitter @janesunley and my website, janesunley.com, or find purplecube.com.

James:  Jane, thank you very much for coming on the Graduate Job Podcast.

Jane:     Pleasure. Thank you.

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