Dear Shlomo:

I write to thank you not only for the wonderful lessons in job-searching which you taught me but, also, to attest to the effectiveness of your advice! I used it and got a great job!

As I had mentioned, I had worked in systems consulting for six years until I got my MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and wanted to go into corporate finance, figuring the Wharton brand would boost my chances of getting hired. But it hardly made a difference.

I sent my resume to hundreds of companies, internet postings and job hunters. I talked to friends and career advisers, heard many lectures on job-hunting and networking, but when I began cold-calling alumni my networking technique was not focused enough. Honestly, I felt pretty desperate.

Only after I heard you speak at a public lecture did things begin to change. I continued contacting alumni but this time I asked them for “five minutes of their time” for “one quick question.” I had a couple of meetings that seemed to progress that way when I heard through a friend that a top pharmaceutical company was hiring. I called one of the managers there and asked for “five minutes of your time.” He said “sure,” but could I send him my resume in advance? I remembered what you said and held off. I told him that since I was making some revisions to it, I wanted to talk to him first, learn what their requirements were and that if I saw a match between their needs and my skills I would happily send my revised resume to him. We agreed to meet at Starbucks.

He had a coffee and I had notebook and pen (I love coffee, but at the time I remembered my focus was not coffee!). I asked him “what skills do you look for in senior financial auditors?” and I diligently wrote down his responses, ”leadership, teamwork, business savvy…” I asked him to elaborate, and he mentioned “engaging personality and likability.” (I smiled and made a few jokes.) Once he was done, he said “well, tell me about you.” Now I was ready to talk.

I simply showed him how the skills he outlined closely matched those I had proven through my professional education and experience, and asked him whether he agreed with my assessment. He said he did and asked me to forward him my resume directly which, of course, I did, but at your direction, only after I made the proper updates! Then I sent it to him asking if he had any comments before forwarding it on to his managers and HR. He said it looked great and to expect a call in the next week. Sure enough, he responded with “congratulations I heard you passed on to the second round!"

I had six rounds of interviews, and during every interview I asked “The Question” again. One interview was particularly amusing…the director succinctly answered my question with two skills, “problem solving ability and team work skills.” Forty minutes later he asked me, “what do you think will be your main contributions to the group?” I confidently told him, “problem solving ability and teamwork skills.” He nodded approvingly.

By the end of my final interview I told the hiring manager that I had asked the same question to each of my interviewers and that they had been fairly consistent in their responses. I added – immodestly – that I thought I had exhibited those skills throughout my career and that I would be delighted to contribute them to the company. To which she replied, “We would be delighted if you would join us. I’d like to make you an offer.” Shlomo, I have been working for three months now, and this is simply the best job I ever had!

The opportunity definitely surpassed my expectations, especially in terms of learning and long-term growth. Many people and lessons helped me get the position, and I definitely count you and your teachings among the top of that list. Once, again I want to thank you for your time, help, and generous insights. I am very grateful for your mitzvah. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can ever be of help to you.

Best regards,
Sebastian Sas

(Note: Mr. Sas has been at Pfizer now for about twenty years.)

Dear Shlomo:

It was the summer of 2013, and why an Ivy-educated guy like me couldn't find the job I wanted was finally getting to me. Not that I wasn't viewing the right websites, seeing the right people, writing good cover notes, pitching my resumés or using every interview skill I had up my sleeve, but with no official corporate experience in Project Management or Technology under my belt and unsure how my skill-set might complement my University of Pennsylvania degree, the magic wasn't working.

Also, I needed a way to talk up the site I created after I watched my mom care for my grandparents. Called MyAgingFolks.com, I launched, promoted and maintained it hoping it would score big-time with the baby boomers, but I didn't exactly waltz it to fame if you know what I mean. So as I approached the private sector for a low six-figure position, a start-up ‘failure’ wasn't something I would enjoy singing about. How could I talk about it in a way that would accentuate some of my best skills? I had heard you had been helping people compete in the workforce, so I gave you a call and asked, "What exactly do you do?"

We sat around your dining room table for our first talk which centered not on my resumé or ambitions but on what criteria I might use to select a coach to help me succeed. That you were documenting all my answers on a yellow legal pad wasn't out of the ordinary since I know it’s impossible to remember verbatim what people say. But it was only later that I understood what you were doing in those early meetings as I learned to compete your way.

First, you demonstrated right away that you were a listener and researcher. I appreciated that. Secondly, you were so open about what what you were scribbling away on your pad, I was inspired to help you get the information you wanted from me. I thought carefully and pinpointed what I thought were my job-hunting weaknesses and slowed down my responses to make sure you got them correctly. Thirdly, as you threw yourself into a process of discovering the information you needed in order to respond to my search for a coach and get me to hire you, I saw how you tailored your advice, clothe it in the proper voice, and make yourself look good.

In actually modeling for me that kind of ‘criteria interview,’ you were selling your service well. You were teaching me how to create the right pitch and sell myself for a job. Now it was time for me to head out and see if I could pay off what I learned from you.

But no sooner than I began to throw myself into it, you'd zoom in on my ‘timidity,’ or what I call my ‘fearfulness’ -- something I’d experienced not only in my search process but also on the job. It was exactly what I needed. Now, with an altered and more positive view of myself and the skills I had to compete, I declined phone interviews in favor of vastly more productive face meetings. And I became less timid in speech and writing as I found and replaced equivocations in my phone calls, emails and interviews with a forthrightness that projected know-how and easy confidence.

To each meeting I brought along one of those yellow lined legal pads that in my hand I could see were icons that made a great, quick, first impression by identifying me as a player, and marking me as a pro who listens, cares, and means business. Minute by minute, the busier I was, the more I wrapped myself up in the specific words I was hearing and writing down and concentrating fully. But the mechanical work of making my fingers go up and down in longhand lines and loops not only protected me from drifting off, but the best thing about your way of note-taking, I found, is that it stopped me from talking about myself or interrupting with a point I want to make or a story I'm dying to tell. It kept me focused and in the room and kept me from wrecking the interview the way I must have done many times when I talked about myself without knowing what people want to learn about me.

And I began to apply your other lessons, too.

I saw going in that it would be a time-waster to apply for a Pearson Education position with a 'resumé dump' that included any number of jobs and duties that could easily be irrelevant to the job. Instead of trying to appear glib and omniscient when interviewing, I had to learn the criteria Pearson used to recruit talent and then address those criteria specifically in my interview presentations. Quite to my surprise, I saw on one of their job descriptions: Ability to seek out creative methods to obtain market data and competitive intelligence. Well, wasn't I doing that very thing?! And, maybe, more importantly, wasn't I, in fact, demonstrating to my interviewers that I could do that?

So to execute this strategy, I secured face to face meetings with three separate middle managers. And by using your rarely taught skills of sales dialogue, I acquired the information I wanted. After meeting the first manager, I shared my notes of that meeting with the second, and shared the notes of that second meeting with the third manager I met, comparing what everyone said to see which necessary skills and traits had priority and get us all on the same page. Through this sales approach, I successfully established a list of criteria that now gave me an edge over competitors who didn't know what I knew and repositioned me to address the most important skills that Pearson sought in a Product Management Director. But I still didn't have a mastery of your system down pat.

It was time to regroup with you and learn how competition as a discovery process encompassed not only getting new or unused information from and about the market, but figuring out what I was most capable of. The next step, therefore, was for me to assemble a portfolio of my own achievement stories I could pull out of my hat, so to speak, to match the criteria for a job. Each achievement had to be written according to a structure you developed that would illustrate any number of skills and could be used at an interview or enumerated in a resumé or an interview follow-up note. Two examples we worked on together:

ABILITY TO TRANSLATE DATA INTO A COHERENT AND COMPELLING STORY

The elder-law attorneys and geriatric care managers who were my paying customers at MyAgingFolks.com needed to connect with the baby-boomers who trafficked on my site and, without losing billable hours, offer them just enough free phone advice to turn these leads into clients. Using Twilio’s web-telephony API, I developed a button for site users to enable them to enter their credit card numbers for billing, call a professional and, at the end of ten minutes, turn a free chat into a paid consultation. I added this minimal viable product (MVP) feature to our roadmap and personally demonstrated it to a hundred beta testers in my customer base of social workers and lawyers who, I was pleased to see, gave it a thumbs up. But the good news was ephemeral. When I rolled this out to a broader audience of 5000 professionals who were mostly in their fifties and sixties, nobody bit. I came to understand that it was the personalized presentation that made all the difference (which clearly I couldn’t scale up for the wider audience beyond the testers). So I reprioritized our backlog and promoted a test-version of the feature with a sales-focused landing page customers could use to test the new feature for themselves. I then re-launched the product and sent emails directing professionals to the demonstration page. As a result of that effort, hundreds of MyAgingFolks.com customers were able to try the feature first, understand its value for their business, and sign-up as Premium Expert Members.

As you taught me your method, you pulled no punches wherever you saw in me a sign of weakness to tell me the truth as you saw it. But when you sensed my vulnerability to the power of your remarks, you pulled back to apologize. And then I must tell you how exciting it was for me to see how many more ways I could use gratitude to keep a conversation growing and flourishing whenever the opportunity shines its radiant head: Like:

• “Thank you for taking the time to give me the job criteria and getting us on the same page.”

• “Thanks for listening to my achievement stories to see whether they match the skills you look for in the position.”

• “Thanks for correcting my perception of what was needed in this particular area.”

• “Thanks for offering to introduce me to the person in charge of hiring.”

• ”Thanks for guiding me through the rounds of interviews.”

• “Thanks for the offer. I think this is the right time to discuss compensation”

The possibilities are so many! There’s always a reason for gratitude. And if it goes without saying that it’s a good trait have on any job, then my exercise of that trait during the interview shows solid evidence to the interviewer that I have it!

You also taught me how a thank you note that (1) follows up the interview, (2) recalls and reemphasizes important points made, and (3) requests more information or a critique only advances the selling process. I also began to learn from you, Shlomo, not only how to recover from every rejection but take the necessary steps to avoid the pitfalls the next time around. If I was being turned down because it appeared as if I didn’t have certain skills or experience, I had to ‘regroup’ and see whether, in fact, I could summon up an account of these skills from my past the next time if I needed to.

At the end of June, I asked you to help me re-approach Goldman Sachs, which I’d been lead to believe was going to offer me a software developer job in their Audit Department. But since I hadn't heard back from them in a while– and now the job was re-posted!–I was unsure what to do. Now, having become aware of the timidity that always seems to sneak in, I got past it and, with your encouragement, learned that they were rethinking the job as an overseas assignment. Although I was initially reluctant to continue to pursue it, you convinced me to get the newest criteria for this job and make my decision about going overseas only after I get an offer. You said, “I apologize for sounding like a cliche here, but life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”

At the beginning of August, while you and I were working together on an upcoming interview with Blackrock, Goldman surprised me with a call to renew our talks about the earlier job, which, to me, was like Heaven-sent. You told me never to bet on any one job coming through, since you never know until the end; still, I could smell it. During the course of those last several interviews with them, you and your system gave me the confidence to walk into each interview with the skills to sell myself in a way I might not otherwise have been able to. On August 26th, we closed. I accepted their offer.

Shlomo, you have changed my view of the potential we have to compete better and sell ourselves if we only knew how. To that end, not only do I recommend you to others, but I pledged the first three hundred dollars to a fund I created to subsidize people who need you as much as I did–or more –but are reluctant or just can’t afford to pay you your reasonable fee. You deserve to succeed well in what you are doing, and anyone who assists you in this effort is making the greatest investment in the world.

Sincerely,

Jordan