Dawn G. – 125 applicants, 2 wk. interview process – $170,000 Base + Options

A note from Barbara Limmer, Dawn’s SC&C Campaign Director.  I am thrilled to announce that Dawn has accepted the position of Director of IT for XXXX, a cloud computing and voice company. Dawn came to us after she had been laid off when her company was sold. She had never really interviewed or looked for a job before—all previous jobs came to her through referrals and recommendations. She admitted to having a great deal of anxiety about interviewing.

She worked very hard with her campaign director to think through and articulate her achievements, successes and competencies, and she was very pleased with the documents our writers produced (great job Mike Fox and Leslie Noyes!). We also worked on her interview skills and ability to sell herself in interviews.

She had her Phoenix Experience, which included a Behavioral Interview with Kevin Gorham, and one of her comments at the time was “It became clear that I have functioned as a successful leader without knowing the “How” very well.” She says that she learned many things, including “…how to prepare properly for an interview, how to apply my share stories to different scenarios, how to apply the share story structure to other scenarios, to identify the behavioral interviewing technique, to develop clarity around my behavioral competencies, and to reduce my one minute commercial and make it more crisp and sound less rehearsed.”

She thought the DVD we sent her following the Phoenix Experience visit was so helpful that, on her way to her interviews she put her laptop on the passenger seat so that she could listen to the Phoenix Experience DVD and incorporate the feedback she learned before she went into the upcoming interview.

By the end of her search process she found herself interviewing with two companies—one that our candidate marketing specialist Shanti Brown had obtained for her, and another that she had obtained via the first job she applied for using the resume we created for her. When their HR recruiter called, he told her that of the 125 applicants, she was the only female! They moved very quickly, and within 2 weeks and several interviews, she had received their job offer.

During this period, she was also interviewing with the other company and made it to the final round, but the timing of the first offer, and her excitement about the company, caused her to accept the first job without waiting around for the second company. She was pleasantly surprised that they included stock options in her offer, as she knew that their exit strategy would make this lucrative for her within the next 5 years. We worked on negotiation, and they included a “change in control” package to augment their stock options.

When asked what most from the SC&C process contributed to her success, she said the following:

• having a process was great, because she had none previously, and this was extremely beneficial.
• having a whole team supporting her, which included the writers, the campaign director, the writers, the candidate marketing specialist, and the interviewers in Phoenix made her feel that she wasn’t alone.

• feels that our entire program allowed her to see her background in a whole new light, to think about her experiences in ways that she hadn’t before.

• went into her interviews with no anxiety at all because she felt so well-prepared.

• she was a different person after her Phoenix Experience—she was more confident,
• feels that her investment in SC&C was worth every penny.

She’s referred two more people to us as clients! Thank you to Laura Gabel for bringing Dawn in as a client, to Mike Fox and Leslie Noyes — her writing team, to Shanti Brown for marketing her to her target companies, to Kevin Gorham and Fred Coon for your work during her Phoenix Visit, and to Ron Venckus for designing our behavioral interviewing program. I know you all will join me in congratulating Dawn!