I had the distinct pleasure of spending much of last week with 80 amazingly bright and talented Koch Summer Fellows. We bonded over the art of interviewing.

For most, interviewing conjures the same excitement as a root canal or watching a movie marathon on Lifetime. But the Koch Summer Fellows made interviewing an absolute delight. We went through dozens of mock interviews and lots of discussion about what makes for a good interview.

I wanted to share with you several recurring themes from our time together. I’ve boiled them down to eight tips for giving a great interview:

• Bring Your A-Game Handshake: Come with a solid handshake – strong, no knuckle grinding or sweaty palms, and remember eye contact.
• No Sailor Talk: No matter how comfortable you feel with the person interviewing you, do not let curse words fly. No #$%*.
• Wear the Suit: Unless you’ve been told otherwise by the organization, it’s probably best to wear a suit. Worst-case scenario: you’re overdressed. Best-case scenario: you get the job.
• Less Is More: Be careful that your answers to the interviewer’s questions don’t turn into soliloquies. If you (or the interviewer!) have forgotten what the question was midway through your answer, you’ve gone on too long.
• Make It a Disney Story: If your interviewer asks behavior-based interviewing questions (Tell me about a time when …..Give me an example of…Describe a time when…), make sure to share positive stories from your past. Avoid sharing situations that may reflect poorly on you or be misconstrued by the interviewer.
• Show Me the Money: Be ready to discuss salary. Have a range in mind and be confident when you say it.
• Take Out the Trash: Don’t trash your former employer. Even if your former boss engages in felonious behavior, be careful about how you frame the situation.
• Riddle Me This: Come with questions. If the interviewer asks if you have any questions and all you have is crickets, you’re in trouble. If you draw a blank, a question about organizational culture is usually a winner.

Thanks to all the 2012 Koch Summer Fellows for a wonderful week. I feel much better about our future knowing you guys are the next generation of freedom fighters.

My beloved alma mater, Notre Dame, is rich with traditions. One of the better known is the tradition of football players slapping the “Play Like a Champion Today” sign in the locker room as they head out to the field. Yeah, yeah…maybe the sign has been broken the last few years.

One of my favorite displays of Notre Dame tradition comes at the end of football games when students put their arms around each other and sway as they sing the alma mater, “Notre Dame, Our Mother.” Oh, I’m getting all choked up just thinking about it!

Then there’s the ND tradition called the Bun Run, which entails a confident crew of young men streaking through the Hesburgh Library during finals week. You wouldn’t believe how many young ladies don’t set foot in the library until that week!

As you can tell, I’m a big fan of tradition. And that’s true not only when it comes to Notre Dame, but also with résumés.

In the recent past, several nontraditional résumé formats have surfaced. The most common involves leading with “Accomplishments,” “Qualifications,” or “Profile” sections, while burying actual work history at the bottom of the resume. Other novel résumé formats involve tables, charts, text boxes, fancy fonts, color, and — you guessed it — pictures.

While updating your résumé to a new-fangled format might be tempting, I’m here to implore you to stick with tradition.

A résumé really only needs three basic sections:

1. Name/Contact information
2. Education
3. Experience

If you desire, you can add other basic sections such as Special Skills, Civic Participation, or Publications.

Add in a simple, traditional typeface (you can never go wrong with Times New Roman) and a logical, clean format with plenty of white space; and you have yourself a classic résumé!

Drop me a line if you want me to email you a traditional résumé template. And drop by South Bend, IN, during finals week if you want some entertainment!

There’s a troubling phenomenon afoot in the job-hunting universe: friends are giving friends some really questionable advice. Trying to land a new job is hard enough, but it’s just plain rough if your friends are working against you!

Here’s a recent example of the shenanigans. A candidate I was working with refused to provide information that my client requested. The information was standard: five years of tax returns, her personal diary, the results of a Rorschach inkblot test, a urinalysis, and a bulleted list of the contents of her kitchen catch-all drawer. I’m kidding. All my client wanted was some basic information about salary.

(Now that I had you sweating about the urinalysis, you see how innocent the request for salary info is, right?)

I asked the candidate again for the information. She stonewalled.

I explained this was standard operating procedure for many of my clients. All I needed was an idea of current and desired salaries.

Finally, the candidate confessed, “Well, I’ve been advised by a friend not to discuss salary until after the first in-person interview.”

I wanted to cry. At this point I wasn’t even going to be able to score this gal a first interview, let alone a second! Perhaps the friend meant you shouldn’t bring up the topic of salary until later in the process – but that you should certainly provide it if asked? In any case, the person proffering the advice was putting her friend in danger of missing out on a good opportunity.

Here’s another one. A candidate recently asked for a 50% increase from her current salary. After I picked myself off the floor, I explained that the current market isn’t really providing such luxury. She persisted. I tried again, telling her my client might decide to look elsewhere if she insisted on such a steep increase in pay. I finally asked her where she came up with such a range. “My friend told me this was the increase I should expect if I change jobs.”

Oh, boy.

And here’s one more for the road. I recently had an applicant call me repeatedly to check in about an opening. We’re talking more calls than I got from my middle school boyfriend…despite the fact my client explicitly stated, “No phone calls.” I told the candidate I’d be in touch as soon as I had news. Almost like clockwork the candidate offered up this gem, “By the way, sorry about all the calls. A friend told me I should ignore the no phone calls request.”

Unless your friend is the head of HR for Google, take job-hunting advice with a grain of salt.

Are you wondering why there’s a photo of Spike Lee right here? No worries – I’ll get to that in a second.

Last month we covered the topic of nonprofits having difficulties with hiring due to reputational issues. Now we’re going to tackle the nonprofit’s point of view when considering a candidate with a questionable reputation.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sent a promising candidate to one of my clients, only to have my client say they wouldn’t be pursuing the candidate due to reputation issues. No matter what I think of the candidate, it’s over as soon as the client mentions the R word.

What are some of the things that can earn a candidate a bad reputation? Well, I’ll let you use your creativity, but here are a few:

• Accepting a job and then backing out at the last minute or quitting shortly after starting – Yikes. There’s just no good way around this one. Nonprofits talk; and if you jumped ship right after the boat left port, the others will hear about it.
• Trash-talking a former employer – This one happens a lot; and as you can imagine, prospective employers don’t care for it.
• Dishonesty of any kind – Whether it’s a lie on a résumé or a fib about an accomplishment, you’re as good as done if a hiring manager can’t trust you.
• Being wishy-washy or less than solidly committed to free-market principles – On more than one occasion I’ve had clients say they weren’t interested because a candidate worked for a member of Congress who wasn’t truly free-market oriented or because the candidate espoused ideas in a policy piece or blog that were antithetical to free-market thinking. Most of my clients have dedicated their careers to advancing liberty; they aren’t particularly interested in someone who can take it or leave it, depending on expedience.
• Erratic behavior – Candidates who display unpredictable, histrionic, or irrational behavior in a work setting or during the interview process make quick work of scaring hiring managers away.

So, how will you know if you need a little reputation management? Unfortunately, you may not. Most organizations don’t see the upside in sharing the knowledge that a candidate’s reputation has preceded him. And after some of the histrionics I’ve seen from candidates, I can hardly blame them!

Having strong references who can attest to your character or work product may be one way to counteract reputational problems.

However, my best advice is just to do from the start what Spike Lee told us in the late 80’s: do the right thing. If you do, your reputation should be just fine.