Hiring Tricks That Job Seekers Must Know

From Yahoo.com| by Maria Hanson, for LiveCareer

In
this highly competitive job market, employers and recruiters are using
unconventional techniques to screen candidates. It's not enough to just
be prepared for the interview; job seekers need to be prepared to be judged even when it's not clear they're being judged.

Here are some secret tricks that real recruiters and hiring managers use to weed out candidates:

They inspect your car.

Tina
Hamilton, of HireVision Group, knows a corporate president who would
find out which car belonged to the candidate he was interviewing. "The
receptionist ... would then go outside and look in the candidate's car
to see how neat and clean the car was, if there were food wrappers ...
how well maintained the car was," says Hamilton. "The owner considered
this a definition of the candidate's character."

They watch while you wait.

Some
recruiters deliberately keep candidates waiting and have the
receptionist report on how they choose to occupy their time, says
career consultant Eileen Varelas, of Keystone Partners. "So if you are
playing games on your phone instead of reading the Wall Street Journal
on the table in front of you, you could be sabotaging yourself before
you even meet the recruiter," she says.

If you choose to do
something besides quietly sit and wait to be called in, take care in
choosing an appropriate activity. For example, reviewing your resume or
an industry publication would be a good choice. Loudly sampling songs
as you download them to your phone, not so good.

They try to see your inner gossip.

Waffles
Natusch, president of The Barrett Group, says a senior manager client
would have other people on the hiring team do the normal interview
screening. Then he would have a friendly interview
with the applicant during which he'd drop a sideways comment about
someone on the hiring team and ask the candidate's opinion of the
person.? If the candidate agreed or added to the slam, or disagreed and
defended the person, he or she wasn't hired. But if the candidate
refused to acknowledge or discuss the inference, a job offer was
usually made.

They mind your manners.

Many
recruiters use meals as a screening tool. "I know a recruiter who
passed over a candidate because of the way they cut their meat during a
lunch interview," says Varelas. (The candidate cut his meat all at
once, not one piece at a time.) Juliet Boghossian, a behavioral food
expert and columnist for Food-ology.com, teaches execs what they can
learn by the way someone eats.

"By observing an individual's
eating style or food habits, you can quickly reveal their character or
judgment capacity, among many other behavioral facets," she says. For
real insight into your character, work personality and career
interests, take a free career test.

If your resume
passes the first screen and you get called in for an interview, these
are just some of the unusual strategies you may face. Make sure your
resume passes the test with a free resume test and be on your way to landing your dream job.