Page 214 - James Caan - Get the Job you Really Want

I had never seen before. They had taken the business of recruit-
ment and turned it into a process, not a personality.
Their approach was alien to me. I had always believed that
people did well because they were larger-than-life go-getters.
This company said, ‘No, no, no, that’s never going to work,

because you can’t build a business on personality. We have 600
o≤ces. We employ 2,900 consultants. James, you will never be
able to scale your business on personality.’

So, my next question was, ‘But how can you do that?’
What they had done was to take the recruitment process and
divide it into thirty steps. And in each of those component parts
the process was very focused, incredibly detailed. I travelled all
over the States visiting their branches, and was amazed that

everybody I met in every o≤ce followed the process. They made
sure that every step of the way, they took the trouble to do the
right thing – and it worked. They were very successful.

Their message to candidates was simple: ‘If you don’t follow
each step correctly, you have a 1 in 30 chance of getting the job.
With our system we have a 100 per cent chance.’
This book follows the same principle. Before you break down
the process of getting a job, you might imagine there are four

steps: find the vacancy, send your C V, go for an interview, get the
job. I’m saying that if that’s all you do, you are missing twenty-
six other key points. If you follow all the other points, you will

change the odds.
I have tried to avoid filling this book with endless checklists
and grids of do’s and don’ts – I wanted it to be more like a
mentoring session, a conversation, a dialogue. But this is the one

202 get the job you really want