What Color Is Your Parachute 2018 by Richard N. Bolles copy

Conversation Tip #8
The employer is primarily concerned about risk. As I mentioned
earlier, employers hate risks. One risk stands above all the others: that they
may hire you, but you won’t work out. In which case, you are going to cost
the employer a lot of money. Put the search term “cost of a bad hire” into
your favorite Internet search engine (Google?), and see what it turns up.
As you can see, the cost of hiring the wrong person can cost the employer
one to five times the bad hire’s annual salary, or more.
So, during the interview, you may think you are sitting there, scared to
death, while the employer (individual or team) is sitting there, blasé and
confident. But in actual fact you and they may both be quite anxious.
The employer’s anxieties include any or all of the following:
a. That if hired, you won’t be able to do the job: that you lack the
necessary skills or experience, and the hiring-interview didn’t
uncover this.
b. That if hired, you won’t put in a full working day, more often than
not.
c. That if hired, you’ll take frequent sick days, on one pretext or
another.
d. That if hired, you’ll only stay around for a few weeks or at most a few
months, until you find a better job.
e. That if hired, it may take you too long to master the job, and thus it
will be too long before you turn a profit for that organization.
f. That you won’t get along with the other workers there, or that you
will develop a personality conflict with the boss.
g. That you will only do the minimum that you can get away with, rather
than the maximum that the boss was hoping for. Since every boss
these days is trying to keep their workforce smaller than it was before
2008, they are hoping for the maximum productivity from each new
hire post-2008.
h. That you will always have to be told what to do next, rather than