I am sure you can see the advantages of my extra experience. Very little can happen in my job that can surprise me, I am almost an expert in my field and I can use that experience to provide additional advice and training to the less experienced workers. Although my experience may cost you 20 percent more than the experience range you prefer, my experience will provide 50 percent more productivity. My health is excellent and my ambition is high. I plan to stay with this company for many, many years and go as far as I can within it.
If you ever do find yourself in a situation where you believe your age and experience (or lack of either) are being held against you, some of the best arguments I have found to combat that bias are found in the United Technologies reprint on page 90. Age is simply a method of keeping track of how many candles to put on the cake and should not at any time be a logical barrier to a job.
If your counter arguments do not work, do not worry about it. It is undoubtedly more the interviewer’s loss than yours. Before you terminate the discussion, ask for job leads. Then, check back with the interviewer every two weeks for new leads.
Creativity and courage can be very effective in getting a job offer after the interview. Telegrams and Mailgrams are very effective in drawing attention to your candidacy and interest. Other tasteful techniques can be equally powerful. I once interviewed a young woman who decided she wanted to work for me. She returned to my office two days later to ask for the job after she presented me with a bouquet of flowers. She was very creative as she knew that a man seldom, if ever, receives flowers from a woman. Needless to say, she got the job.
I once recruited for a company a young man with one year of experience in the desired area. The company wanted someone with three or more years of experience. Unfortunately, a competing recruiter located a candidate with ten years of experience. In talking with the interviewer one day, I learned that he had narrowed the field down to these two individuals and that he was meeting with another senior executive that afternoon at 2 p.m. to make the decision. I talked to my candidate and suggested that he telephone the interviewer at 2:15 to reiterate his interest in the position. He did so and politely insisted that the secretary contact the interviewer in his meeting. When the interviewer picked up the telephone, my candidate enthusiastically expressed his strong interest in the job. The interviewer thanked him for his call and told him that he, the interviewer, would call him back in ten minutes with the decision. The interviewer did call back in ten minutes and offered my candidate the salary he asked for plus a company car.
My candidate said later that he felt that his telephone call had been the deciding factor. The interviewer subsequently confirmed that fact to me. (In retrospect, I should have suggested that my candidate call just before the meeting to ensure contact before the decision could have been made.)
The secret to outmaneuvering the competition for a job is following up the interview with courage, creativity, and a little good-natured aggressiveness. Companies will tend to make job offers to applicants with average qualifications who express strong interest in the job at the expense of more highly qualified people with indifferent attitudes. Use post interview tactics similar to those described earlier to etch your name more deeply in the interviewer's memory, to repeatedly remind the interviewer of your interest, to identify any obstacles to your being hired, to overcome those obstacles, and, finally, to get the job offer for you instead of your competition, no matter what their qualifications.
Recently, during a recessionary period of spiraling unemployment, a new college graduate creatively job hunted in Denver by parading in front of a downtown office building while wearing a sandwich board that listed his qualifications. Within days, he was besieged with job offers.
