You're DESTROYING your career by not interviewing
Hello and welcome to the very first post on The Corporate Etiquette!
Today I want us to sit down and talk about how you’re actively damaging your career by not interviewing often enough. What’s even crazier, this holds true especially if you’re not really in the market looking for a new job. By the end, hopefully we can also uncover what would be the sweet spot for interview frequency.
Learning from past mistakes
Before we get into the reasons as to why you should be doing this, let me tell you how I learned it the hard way. When I was working at Amazon, recruiters would reach out and ask me if I wanted to interview at their company.
I ALWAYS SAID NO
Back then, I thought you should only interview when you’re trying to change your job and since I didn't want to leave Amazon just yet, I turned everyone away. It was only later that I realized that this was a mistake and I should have taken those opportunities to interview. After being an Amazonian for 5 years, I felt it was time for me to venture out into the corporate world and see how other companies do it. However, at that point in time, I had not interviewed even once in the last 5 years and I had no idea what I should expect. I’m going to be very honest with you:
I messed up the first interviews I got because I was just so out of practice!
All the questions seemed difficult, I didn't know how to prepare for an interview, I didn’t understand what the interviewers were after when asking certain questions, and so on. Honestly, I missed out on some great opportunities because of this. Learn from my mistakes and don’t go through this yourself.
Why you should interview more often?
You Get Practice
First and foremost, you get a lot of practice and you get more comfortable with the interviewing process itself. Let me say it loud and clear:
Interviewing is a separate skill from being good at your job.
You can be extremely capable and good at your day job but not very good at selling yourself during the interview. This is normal, since interviewing is not a skill you practice often. If you do get fired or you’re simply trying to find a new challenge, the whole process of finding a new job won't feel so intimidating since you’ve been interviewing frequently.
2. You get used to rejection
You get used to rejection. Let’s face it, no one wants to be rejected and accepting that you didn’t make the cut is sometimes a difficult pill to swallow. While there are ways to increase your resilience to rejection, learning by doing is also true in this case. The more you face rejection in the labor market, the less of a big deal it seems.
3. Your resume is up to date
You keep your resume and answers up to date at all times. You always have your achievements up to date in your resume, so if push comes to shove, you are ready to hit the ground running! This has an additional benefit of making sure you know your most recent examples, should you be faced with a behavioural question interview (where you are asked to give examples from your past experience).
4. You grow your network
Every time you interact with a new recruiter, you should add them on LinkedIn. Even if the job you were interviewing for didn't work out, you should make sure to keep in touch with the recruiter, and even the hiring manager. If you made a good impression, they might contact you again for a better job that comes along. Not to mention, recruiters also change companies so they might reach out with opportunities from different fields.
5. You know if you're underpaid
When interviewing more often, you get to understand how the salaries in your area are evolving. This way you prevent the situation where you are grossly underpaid by your current company. Ultimately, if you do get a new offer, you can take it to your current employer and try to negotiate a better compensation to stay. A lot of people don’t feel comfortable walking about their salaries - which I personally think is a mistake - so then really the only way you might have to see what salaries are out there is to keep on interviewing. Well, that or checking websites/apps such as Glassdoor, Blind or levels.fyi to see what the reported numbers are at a company.
6. Your prepare for the worst
My dad used to say
Leave the party when you’re having the most fun!
The same of applied to jobs as well. You don’t want to wait until you’re desperate for a new job either because of toxic work culture or because you got fired. You should always be on the lookout for new opportunities. If you wait until things get bad you might jump ship to the nearest opportunity even if it’s not a good move career wise for you. At that point, you have no choice but to accept whatever job comes your way and that's a horrible place to be in.
How often should you interview?
ow that we established WHY you should interview often, let's see what would be the sweet spot for interviewing. In my opinion,
You should be interviewing AT LEAST once every 6 months
To clarify, when I say you should interview at least every 6 months, I'm not suggesting to go on a 20-30 interview spree. That would be unfeasible! However, you should try to get one or two interviews penciled into your schedule to make sure that you stay on your toes. I’m not saying you should go on a 20 interview spree, just one or maybe two interviews to keep the practice and get all the benefits I mentioned above,
For all the recruiters still reading...
The recruiters reading until this point at most likely annoyed right now. They're probably thinking we’re out here wasting their time but let me argue that this is not the case. Even if someone doesn’t intend to leave their job, if they are interviewing it means they are open to discussion. Ultimately, if the opportunity is incredibly good, they will take it and you have a new employee.
That's it for today. Until next time, this is Laura signing off.
