Managers often think that they have reached a career level where they have been magically imbued with the gift of giving a good job interview. It doesn’t work that way.

By Stephenie Overman

FORTUNE — What songs best describe your work ethic? How many cows are in Canada? A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?

Those queries come from the Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions for 2013, as compiled by the job hunters’ website Glassdoor. Allegedly, they’re all actual conversational gambits used by corporate interviewers.

You may think such questions could produce useful insights. Or you might see them as off the wall. But are your interview questions any better?

Managers tend to think of interviewing job candidates as “something that’s easy,” says Pamela Skillings, president and chief trainer at Skillful Communications in New York. Believing they’ve reached a career level where they have been magically imbued with the gift of giving a good job interview, such managers wing it and fail to prepare questions that will reveal the best potential employees. All too often, they get a penguin in a sombrero.

“They end up hiring someone who costs the company a lot” in wasted training time and salary expenses, Skillings says. “You try to fix the mistake you made in the interview process. Then you have to fire the person or move them into a different role, and you have to start over.”

A bad interview “hurts the manager first,” Skillings says. “A bad hire is going to come back to bite you.”

Some managers try to protect themselves with vague questions of the “tell-me-about-yourself” variety. But experts say such prosaic questions produce answers of little use.

Before you sit down with job candidates, “you need a great shopping list” that lays out what you need to know about each applicant for a particular position, says Mel Kleiman, author of Hire Tough, Manage Easy and president of HR consulting firm Humetrics, which is based in Sugar Land, Texas. It’s basic stuff, Kleiman says: “Can you do the job? Can you do the job at the degree of excellence needed? Will you do it? Can you and I live together? If you are hired, can you put up with our culture and [can] we put up with your personality?”

Those aren’t the interview questions, Kleiman says. They’re templates you can use to design questions whose answers will tell you, “Is this person right for the job and is this job right for the person?”

Rather than focusing on eliciting the answers they need, inexperienced interviewers often ask rote questions that “bounce along the surface without getting to know the real person behind the interview hype,” says Paul Falcone, author of 96 Great Interview Questions to Ask Before You Hire. “There’s not much rhyme or reason to their questioning techniques” and they ask the same basic types of questions to all candidates for all positions.

Falcone’s examples of rote questions:

• Who was your favorite boss, and what would he or she say about you?
• Which position was your favorite and why?
• Why do you think you’d want to work here?
• What questions can I answer for you?

Effective interviewers ask “behavioral” questions, according to Skillings. They use phrases such as, “tell me about a time, give me an example,” she says, because the way a person reacted to a past situation may be an indication of what he or she will do in the future.

So, “instead of asking ‘Are you a good negotiator?’ it’s better to say, ‘Tell me about a negotiation and how it went.’ Get a real example. Probe for details. Get to the heart of what you need to know,” Skillings says.

Falcone agrees. “We need objective diagnostic indicators of an individual’s probability of succeeding within our organization.” Otherwise, interviewers are “left picking from among people who may sell themselves better than others.”

Falcone’s examples of effective interview questions:

• Walk me through the progression in your career leading me up to what you do now on a day-to-day basis.
• What makes you stand out among your peers?
• What criteria are you using in selecting your next employer, including the industries you’re considering, company criteria, and the roles and titles that you’re pursuing?
• If you were to accept a position with us today, how would you describe that to a prospective employer five years from now in terms of your career development and longer-term goals?

Ask questions that “reveal a candidate’s level of career introspection,” Falcone says. “Do they know what they want? Can they articulate their career history in a clear and compelling manner?”

During the interview, really listen to the candidate, Kleiman says. “You’ll never learn anything while you’re talking.”

If hiring people isn’t your main job, don’t be afraid to ask for help, recommends Skillings, who teaches workshops and online courses on conducting interviews. “We see a little bit of attitude from managers” at the beginning of training, she says. “`I don’t need this, I know how the deal works.’ By the end, they realize they didn’t know things, or were rusty.”

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/03/08/why-so-many-job-interviewers-are-terrible/

Applying the core principles of project management to your hiring and training practices is one of the best ways to both attract and retain qualified hospitality staff with a positive attitude. “Plan and execute,” the mantra of accomplished project managers, refers to the second and third phases of traditional, or phase-based project management, which are all about strategy.

Here are some tips to help you create an effective strategy for hiring the best professionals for your establishment.

1. Set clear and precise hiring and retention goals. How many people do you need to build your dream team, and how are their duties divided? Will your team members acquire new skills and responsibilities throughout their tenure at your establishment, or are their roles fixed from the start? Remember, while setting goals, that the hospitality maxim of “hire the smile and train the skills” is only as useful as you make it; and that means defining in words, what a positive employee attitude looks like in practice.

   Bear in mind that it probably won’t look the same for every employee, especially those with very different skills and responsibilities. So don’t just list general personal attributes; place your ideal hires in challenging, position-specific situations and describe their speech and actions.

2. Get organized. Take inventory of the resources at your disposal, including available project-management tools, hiring budget, and time-frame. Schedule plenty of wiggle room for unexpected obstacles: a surplus of qualified applicants, budgetary changes, employee illness, hard-to-reach applicant references, etc. Then, start planning your interview process.

   Be sure to include at least three or four behavior-based questions, such as “Tell me about a time when a stressful situation got the best of you at work,” or “What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made as a server/front-desk manager/chef/concierge/etc.? How did you remedy the situation?”

3. Use role play. Any major change to your interview process merits a practice session with a team member or fellow hospitality manager, particularly when first adding tough questions, such as those above, to the roster. As your establishment’s representative and manager, you are firmly in charge of the interview dynamic, and deploying forced questions will get you forced answers.

   You may also want to role-play with applicants when posing your challenge questions. Pay attention to the entire person as he or she responds; body language, tone of voice and facial expression are all powerful indicators of attitude.

4. Keep the lines of communication open. Your supervisor, current team members, and even professional competitors can help you refine and revise your hiring process if you keep an open mind and seek out their expertise, experiences and feedback. Meet regularly with front- and back-of-house staff and establish interdepartmental communications protocol, whether via email, project-management tools, or shift-change documentation. Recognize strong employee performances in front of other staff members, and thank employees frequently for their service and loyalty.
5. Initiate new and existing employee training. In any high turnover industry, consistency in quality and kind of services rendered, particularly when integrating new hires, is best established by ongoing employee training sessions and performance incentives. When crafting training sessions, seek your team members’ input. Ask them what “soft skills” comprise a positive attitude and how they recognize those skills in practice. Solicit feedback on the most challenging aspects of customer service in your establishment and consider formalizing, with recognition or award systems, employee best practices.
6. Stay flexible. Seasoned project managers know better than to expect perfection of any person or process. Instead, they find humor and opportunities for personal growth in every possible outcome. If your first round of interviews or new hires is a flop, step back from the experience, make note of where things went wrong (mistakes are usually attributable to inadequate planning or preparation), and revise your strategy accordingly.

Finally, never forget that attitude flows downhill from the top. Staying open to acknowledging and learning from your mistakes will insure that your attitude remains positive and your employees will follow your lead.

This guest post is provided by Ren Lacerda who works with University Alliance on behalf of Michigan State University and University of Florida covering topics on Hospitality Management and Human Resource Management. You can follow Ren on Twitter @RenMarketing.

Everyone wants to be the candidate that stands out.  Many of the rumored tricks are mostly hot air. Others, like attending an elite university, may make you an attractive candidate, but knowledge without experience can be an obstacle.

Here are some common missteps candidates make when applying to larger corporations in the hospitality industry.

Post High School Job Experience

Were you a waitress instead of an intern when you were 19? the path to landing your dream job shows your intent. Did you lifted boxes to pay debts, and another candidate interned within the hospitality industry for an assistant manger. These not only reveal your interest, but it also makes you more interesting and ‘stand out’ from the other candidates.

Your Major

Did you major in liberal arts?  You don’t pick a major like that if you want to work for one of the big hospitality corporations.  Your guidance counselor might have said that it doesn’t matter what you major in as long as  you are passionate.  This may sound great in secondary education, but it doesn’t look good on a resume. A psych, business, or leadership major will stand out. Also, why just one major?  The best advice is to pick majors that are directly relevant to the hospitality industry, and working with people

Community Service

Everyone volunteers today to improve their resume, but what you do says a lot about you. Did you serve soup in a soup kitchen? This may be great if you want to focus on the customer service, entry level of the hospitality industry.  No HR manger will look at a resume and say ‘how sweet, you fed Christmas dinner to homeless children.’

From a success or career coaching standpoint, start standing out when you start your career. Try hunting for sales or marketing positions with a charity.  Look for team management positions.

Communication

The higher you aim, the better your communication skills. This is important in any career, in any industry. If you cannot ‘say what you mean and mean what you say,’ and if you cannot get your point across succinctly then there is no way you’ll sell ideas to a board, or talk your team into working overtime, taking a benefit cut, or network in the business community.

Network

Did you get to know your professors? Did you go the extra mile to network in the business community, or when volunteering a charity?  Everyone has heard a story where a professor, manager, colleague went to bat for someone when writing a letter of recommendation for a job application. Sometimes the name at the bottom of the resume is more powerful than the recommendation itself.

Specialize

The ‘Jack of all trades’ has never been in high demand. If you want to work with one of the top hospitality industries then you must be able to handle one aspect of the corporation. The best restaurant mangers have specific things in common. The best general managers share traits that are different than those shared by the best kitchen managers.

Associating with professionals, interning, and volunteering in the hospitality industry can help you find the niche where you belong, the career where you will excel.

Your GPA Doesn’t Matter

There is little truth to the rumor that a low GPA can limit your future. In fact, companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft place GPA low on the list of prerequisites for their candidates.  Top companies look for the top candidates, people with a track record of success, not successful students.

Don’t Limit Yourself

Even if you have none of the aspects listed in this article, you may still be the restaurant manager some corporation is looking for. You really don’t know what you have to offer a company until you start. You never know what skills you’ve acquired and how those skills can be used to excel in the hospitality industry.

HR managers and headhunters see huntress of resumes each day from all levels of restaurant managers. They quickly stop looking for the right or perfect resume format. A properly laid out resume does not guarantee that the candidate will be a successful restaurant manager.  The most the resume format can identify is your personal choice.

10 second commercial

The resume should not be a job description. The HR manager knows the restaurant manager’s job description and assumes that if you’ve held the job, you’ve done the tasks. The recruiter wants to see where you’ve been, and your level of experience. They want to know whether your skills have developed a General manager, kitchen manager, etc… But if nothing catches their eye than they will move on.

At the most, you have 30 seconds to capture the recruiters attention. This is probably much shorter later in the day, and may be extremely short Friday afternoon.

Success and Accomplishments

Save the task details for the interview. Your successes will highlight your skill base, strengths, and weaknesses. They want to know the impact your decisions made on the bottom line.

Did you save the restaurant money?

Were you a problem solver?

Are you a team leader/trainer?

Will your skills save the company money/reduce outsourcing?

Did you increase revenue, reduce costs, reduce overturn?

Are you good at marketing and customer retention?

Are you a good organizer, planner?

Are you a good problem solver?

Do not try to be everything for every HR manager. Identify your greatest strength and focus on the skills and experience that show your ability to handle problems, and find solutions in this aspect of the job.

Tips and Advice

Instead of listing:

- tasks – focus on the outcomes

- education – highlight leadership skills

- achievements – recognize awards and acknowledgements

- experience – outline your personal development

It is important to realize that you won’t win every job in the job seeker campaign. It is dangerous to try to be ‘everything to everyone’ and hope to get ‘a bite’. Instead of trying to get ‘a’ job, work to win ‘the job’, your dream job.

Once you’ve developed the skills needed to manage a restaurant, successfully, and develop a strong team who are motivated and goal oriented, it is time to sell your skills.  The restaurant manager’s job requires good communication skills, and the ability to present projects and reports in a way that will sell ideas to the team, management, investors, and to the customers who walk through the doors each day.

The resume is the first place you have to highlight your skills.

Identify Yourself as a Serious Candidate

HR managers are less interested in what you have done for others, or what you have learned. They are interested in seeing what you can do for them. If you’ve followed this blog then you’ve seen multiple places that discuss your personal development. Invest some time in personal development. Listing coaching, courses, and career development steps you’ve successfully completed is a great way to alert HR managers to the fact that you are aggressively and seriously focused on becoming the solution to the restaurant’s problems, not another problem.

Identify Yourself as a Team Leader

The days when managers barked orders and punish poor performance are over. Today’s manager needs to develop their communication skills. They need to be able to motivate and encourage, not push. The stakes are high. The cost of replacing disgruntled employees is staggering. The cost of investing in training, and then having an employee leave because they do not feel empowered, fulfilled, or challenged is immeasurable.

A manager needs to be able to develop their team, encourage and motivate them, and create an environment that encourages longevity.  Even when this is done, the good manager understands that the team’s personalities, boundaries, and personal habits can undermine the team. They learn to identify problems and create solutions that will empower the team, and encourage them.

They understand that the reason to build a strong team is to reduce the loss caused by employee overturn, days off, conflict in the workplace, and resentment directed toward management.

Understanding these is only half the battle. It is important to learn how to condense that information into your resume. It is necessary to understand which skills will make your resume stand out above the crowd.

There are two main obstacles to career development. The main one is the ability to make plans. The second one is the ability to execute plans.  Before understand how to create an execution plan you need to be able to identify a clear goal. This is important because the ability to put your plans on paper in an articulate, clearly understood outline is the first step every restaurant manager needs to get any plan ‘off the ground.’

You have goals and dreams. The creative strategy that you’ve built success on has taken years to develop. You have a strong focus on your short term and long term goals, but nothing happens.  Your career as a restaurant manager has not followed the path to your dream job. You continue to be a job seeker instead of a restaurant manager whom the headhunters are courting. Dreams crash, not in a quick dive, but slowly they are eroded by the day to day tasks that eat the time needed to execute your goals.

The problem is what we term as the ‘whirlwind’ or tornado. This is a continual, ravenous, insatiable vortex that draws everything inside but produces nothing. It involves all those daily tasks which drain our energy.

This is one of the most devastating obstacles to the ambitious performance minded professional. They watch other people succeed while their goals quietly fade from their bucket list. Not because they are lazy, not because they hire the wrong people.

The problem lies in the fact that the goals are forward looking and all the data, numbers, plans are backward focused. They report what has been done and accomplished. The numbers, strategies, and perspectives never deal with the day to day activities which destroy our goals.

The art of execution is one aspect of success that must be conquered if you want to reach your goals.

Career coaching with a mentor in the industry you want to excel can shorten the learning curve. It can also help identify the skills needed to change from a Job Seeker to a Restaurant Manager. There are many tips and hints in these blogs to help you make the leap to your dream career, no matter how high you want to go.

Many job seekers already have a good job in a small establishment. Their goal is to break through the glass ceiling and make their move to the next level, whether it be with a larger restaurant or maybe as the general manager.

Knowledge is power, but only when a manager knows how to make the move. As a performance coach I often hear people complain that they know ‘what’ to do, but they have no idea how to do it. In this blog gecko hospitality offers bite size tutorials to help you understand how to apply techniques that have been taught in college, or on the work floor.

Enjoy and we encourage you to log in and talk to one of our hospitality industry recruitment experts.

by: Marty Tarabar CPC
marty@Geckohospitality.com

Don’t let your resume stop you from getting the interview.

Yes, it is illegal to discriminate because of age, but, corporate recruiters can decide whether or not to interview based solely on what they see on your resume.

“Over 30 years of management experience” says you are close or over 50 years old. Does the target company, you are sending your resume to, have 50 year old managers running their operations?  Let’s face it, you don’t see many 50 year old managers at your local Applebee’s or Chili’s.

How to avoid this type of discrimination.

FIRST  -  Always be honest!  Any falsehood on a resume or an application can be a justification for dismissal once hired by a company

SECOND  -  Don’t offer too much information!  Employment history older than 15 years is unnecessary. Employers want to know about your recent employment and successes. Listing earlier positions will only “age” you in the eyes of the person reading the resume

THIRD  -  Eliminate graduation dates!  When listing education, list degrees obtained, but not dates received. After you have an initial interview, when filling out an application, you will be asked for dates of schooling.  Listing your high school graduation year gives the recruiter your age.

Your resume should be designed for the sole purpose of getting your foot in the door, by presenting your career and accomplishments.  Corporate recruiters spend only seconds, yes, just seconds scouring your resume.  After all, your resume came in with hundreds of others in response to a job ad for a hotel or restaurant manager.

The “over 30 years of experience” headline might work for someone looking to fill a corporate level position. But, the recruiter wants to be able to see where you’ve worked recently, and what your accomplishments were.

Limit your list of experience to your last three management positions .  Using bullet points, list 3 or 4 major accomplishments for each position showing your leadership, sales building and cost control successes.

Your educational background is very important. Most posted restaurant and hotel management  positions require a college degree.  List the college(s) you attended and the degree(s) received.  Again, be honest. Employers will check with colleges to see if you indeed graduated.

We live in a world mad for talent. From Hollywood and sports to executive search firms and HR departments around the globe, everyone seeks that special mix of natural abilities and attitudes that will make performance pop. A few months ago, Douglas Conant wrote a terrific blog post on how to find talented candidates for a job. When evaluating a potential hire, Conant looks for a strong mix of three qualities — competence, character, and skill as a team player. He gives great advice on how to find such a person. But he’s missing a crucial ingredient.

That ingredient, at least as important as the talent package described by Conant, is passion for the work — what psychologists call intrinsic motivation. Without it, no amount of talent will yield great performance. For 35 years, we have been exploring how motivation affects creativity. In studies involving groups as diverse as children, college students, professional artists, and knowledge workers, we have found that people are more creative when they are more strongly intrinsically motivated — driven by interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and a sense of personal challenge in the work they are doing.

Arthur Schawlow, a Nobel laureate in physics, said it eloquently: “The labor of love aspect is important. The successful scientists often are not the most talented, but the ones who are just impelled by curiosity. They’ve got to know what the answer is.”

Intrinsically motivated people are more creative because they engage more deeply with the work. Imagine a task you have to do — say, an important marketing problem you have to solve at work — as a maze you need to get through. Most business problems have multiple solutions that would work, multiple exits from that maze. Often, there is one clear, straight path out of the maze — the standard solution that everyone uses for this type of problem. If you’re extrinsically motivated, perhaps by a looming deadline or fear of a negative evaluation, you’re likely to take that safe path. The solution works, but it’s boring; it doesn’t move things forward. But if you’re intrinsically motivated, you love the hunt through the maze for a more interesting — and likely more creative — solution.

As a manager, you can leverage the link between passion and creativity by following three guidelines:

First, hire for passion as much as for talent. If you don’t look for passion in the people you hire, you could end up with employees who never engage deeply enough to dazzle you with their creative productivity. As Conant advises, get to know potential hires for important positions as thoroughly as possible, long before you might have an opening for them. When you talk to them, ask why they do what they do, what disappointments they’ve had, what their dream job would be. Look for fire in their eyes as they talk about the work itself, and listen for a deep desire to do something that hasn’t been done before. When you talk to their references, watch for mentions of passion.

Second, nourish that passion. Unfortunately, standard management approaches often (unwittingly) end up dousing passion and killing creativity. But keeping it alive isn’t rocket science. We have found that the single most important thing you can do to fuel intrinsic motivation is to support people’s progress in the work that they are so passionate about. This is the progress principle, and it applies even to the seemingly minor small wins that can lead to great breakthroughs. You can use the progress principle by understanding what progress and setbacks your people are experiencing day by day, getting at the root causes, and doing whatever you can to remove the inhibitors and enhance the catalysts to progress.

For example, be vigilant about whether your creative professionals have sufficient resources to make progress without a constant struggle. Give them autonomy in how to achieve a project’s goals, because there’s no point in hiring people with great talent if you don’t let them use it. And support them in learning from both successes and failures, because talent is not a fixed quantity; it can and should grow over time. Give talented people every opportunity to develop, keeping in mind the “10,000 hour rule” cited by Malcolm Gladwell: You can’t become expert enough to create an innovative breakthrough in a field unless you have put in at least 10,000 hours of practice. That kind of persistence is fueled by passion.

Finally, look to yourself. If you don’t have passion for your own work, you’ll end up disappointing both yourself and those who count on you. And you’re unlikely to develop your own best talents. One of us, Steve, is an avid photographer of landscapes. An important mentor, the photographer Craig Tanner, has taught both of us a great deal about the connection between passion and the development of talent. In a brilliant essay on “The Myth of Talent,” Craig says: “Long-term, focused, practice powered by the energy of passion [...] leads to amazing transformations. The bumbling beginner becomes the exalted expert. The trapped and depressed become the liberated and empowered.”

Ask yourself: Am I liberated and empowered by passion in my work? Are the people around me?

12:25 PM Monday February 27, 2012

Harvard Business Review Press
by Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer

5 Ways to Spot a Bad Boss In An Interview

Stephanie Taylor Christensen, Contributor Forbes.com

A boss can literally, make or break your career. Here are five ways to spot the bad ones before they become yours.

A great boss can make you feel engaged and empowered at work, will keep you out of unnecessary office politics, and can identify and grow your strengths. But a bad boss can make the most impressive job on paper (and salary) quickly unbearable. Not only will a bad boss make you dislike at least 80% of your week, your relationships might suffer, too. A recent study conducted at Baylor University found that stress and tension caused by an abusive boss “affects the marital relationship and subsequently, the employee’s entire family.” Supervisor abuse isn’t always as blatant as a screaming temper tantrum; it can include taking personal anger out on you for no reason, dismissing your ideas in a meeting, or simply, being rude and critical of your work, while offering no constructive ways to improve it.  Whatever the exhibition of bad boss behavior, your work and personal life will suffer. Merideth Ferguson, PH.D., co-author of the study and assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at Baylor explains that “it may be that as supervisor abuse heightens tension in the relationship, the employee is less motivated or able to engage in positive interactions with the partner and other family members.”

There are many ways to try and combat the effects of a bad boss, including confronting him or her directly to work towards a productive solution, suggesting that you report to another supervisor, or soliciting the help of human resources.  But none of those tactics gurantee improvement, and quite often, they’ll lead to more stress. The best solution is to spot a bad boss—before they become yours! Here are five ways to tell whether your interviewer is a future bad boss.

1. Pronoun usage. Performance consultant John Brubaker says that the top verbal tell a boss can gives is in pronoun choice and the context it is used. If your interviewer uses the term “you” in communicating negative information ( such as, “you will deal with a lot of ambiguity”), don’t expect the boss to be a mentor.  If the boss chooses the word “I” to describe the department’s success—that’s a red flag.  If the interviewer says “we” in regards to a particular challenge the team or company faced, it may indicate that he or she deflects responsibility and places blame.

2. Concern with your hobbies. There is a fine line between genuine relationship building, and fishing for information, so use your discretion on this one. If you have an overall good impression of the potential boss it may be that he or she is truly interested in the fact that you are heavily involved in charity work, and is simply getting to know you. On the other hand, the interviewer may be trying to determine whether you have too many commitments outside of work. The interviewer can’t legally ask if you are married, or have kids, so digging into your personal life can be a clever way to understand just how available you are.

3. They’re distracted. The era of email, BlackBerrys and smartphones have made it “okay” for people to develop disrespectful communication habits in the name of work. Particularly in a frenzied workplace, reading email while a person is speaking, multi-tasking on conference calls and checking the message behind that blinking BlackBerry mid-conversation has become the norm of business communications. But, regardless of his or her role in the company, the interviewer should be striving to make a good impression—which includes shutting down tech tools to give you undivided attention. If your interviewer is glancing at emails while you’re speaking, taking phone calls, or late to the interview, don’t expect a boss who will make time for you.

4. They can’t give you a straight answer. Caren Goldberg, Ph.D. is an HR professor at the Kogod School of Business at American University. She says a key “tell” is vague answers to your questions. Listen for pauses, awkwardness, or overly-generic responses when you inquire what happened to the person who held the position you are interviewing for, and/or what has created the need to hire. (For example, if you are told the person was a “bad fit,” it may indicate that the workplace doesn’t spend much time on employee-development, and blames them when things don’t work out).

You should also question turnover rates, how long people stay in given roles, and what their career path has been. All of these answers can indicate not only if the boss is one people want to work for, but whether pay is competitive, and employees are given a career growth plan.

5. They’ve got a record. Ask the potential boss how long he or she has been at the company, in the role, and where he or she worked before coming to it to get a feel for his or management style, and whether it’s what you respond to.  For example, bosses making a switch from a large corporation to a small company may lead with formality. On the other hand, entrepreneurs tend to be passionately involved in business, which can be a help or a hindrance, depending on your workstyle.

Goldberg also recommends searching the site eBossWatch, where you read reviews that former employees have given to a boss. If you’re serious about the position, she also suggests reaching to the former employee whose spot you are interviewing for, and asking for their take on the workplace. (LinkedIn makes this task easy to do). The former employee’s recount may not necessarily reflect your potential experience, but it can help you to determine whether his or her description of the job and company “jibes” with what the potential boss said.

“Unemployment discrimination” and the jobless
By: Elaine Quijano (CBS News)

Of the 14 million Americans currently unemployed, 6 million have been jobless for more than 6 months.

CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano reports that many job seekers say being unemployed is being held against them.

Delores Barnes always goes job hunting armed with her dossier of documents, including her birth certificate.

Two years ago, she was laid off from her supervisor job with New York’s Children’s Services. Ever since, Barnes has been looking for work to support her and her nine-year-old daughter, Savianna “I can’t give up. I’m on a mission. I have a daughter, and she’s like, I have to be strong for her. I have to show her that you just don’t give up,” Barnes says.

Yet no amount of persistence can overcome the simple fact that some employers don’t want to hire the unemployed. In job posting after job posting, companies require that applicants “must be currently employed.”

“They have that perception that they are the dead weight, therefore they want the strong people who are currently employed,” says Robert Krzak, president of Gecko Hospitality.

Krzak says some companies won’t even consider unemployed job candidates.
“If there is a candidate out there who has been out there in the job market for six months or even a year or more than a year, a lot of companies are very suspect of that, because why aren’t they working?” Krzak says.

“It’s discriminatory and the fact that just because you don’t have a job you can’t compete for a job,” says Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. DeLauro is sponsoring a bill aimed at stopping the practice.

“These are competent people. They have lost their job through no fault of their own,

Why shouldn’t they have an opportunity?” DeLauro says.
Barnes says the practice doesn’t make sense, hiring people who have jobs when so many don’t.

Barnes is now training to be a computer technician, and says she’ll keep pounding the pavement, even though with some companies she can’t even get her foot in the door.