Your Name Could Be Your Biggest Enemy

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What if your parents gave you a very unique, non-traditional name. Perhaps you are simply, not American born, so you have a foreign name. Whatever the reason of your unique name might be, if you are applying for jobs, it could become that one thing lowering your chances of even getting a job interview. You think that I am making it up?

Let’s just say that I have a very unique name myself and that I have had a very hard time looking for a professional job. Every single time when I would not even get an interview I would questions myself what is the reason why other people with lower qualifications get to interview for the same positions that I get rejected from.

All this was going on until I got invited to interview with one of the Midwest based large corporations for accounting position. It turned out that the recruiter would have not been able to hire me even if she wanted to, because I was a fresh college graduate and the position required a minimum of 2 years of experience. The point of her inviting me to the interview was to help me. She told me that most of the time when other recruiters see my name on a resume, they might feel uncomfortable to even try to pronounce it. So what many of them do is just throwing it into a trash can. She told me this based on her interactions with her fellow recruiters in the industry as well as the experiences that she had while working side by side to many different recruiters in her career.

At first I was shocked, I did not even know how to react to what was told to me. I literally felt like I just swallowed my tongue. She noticed it and started explaining to me that her real name is not the name that she used to contact me either. She told me that she was not born in the United States and that she only uses the “American” name to make her life easier in the professional world. Apparently a foreign name can raise many mis-perceptions about the person without even giving a person a chance. Some people think that foreign/unique name might mean that the person is not fluent in English and that it will be hard to train them if the person is hired. There are numerous of things that go through the recruiters mind when seeing a resume with a unique name.

Instead of feeling put down and complaining about the world not being fair to me, I started putting down my “Americanized” name on my resumes and all of the outgoing correspondence. This has significantly improved the response rates that I was getting in regards to my job applications. I analyzed the response rates that I was getting with my normal name and a current name, and the results that I came across just proved that sometimes recruiting process can be very unfair. We could go complain in the forums or discussion boards about discrimination or the unfairness of this type of treatment or we could take actions to adapt to the situation that we are presented with.

My advice for you folks, that have unique names is to change them on paper (resumes, cover letters) so that you do not eliminate yourself from the recruiting process in case you come across a recruiter that is not too excited about seeing a very different, unique name in front of his/her eyes.

Beginning of Your Career

To start your career on the right foot you will need to have a good resume and a great cover letter. If you are not the best resume writer and do not have the necessary education to polish your resume, I would highly advice you to reach out to the career center of the school that you have graduated from. However, if you feel like spending some money, you might want to consider some professional resume writing services such as JobFox.

As far as a cover letter goes I will include sample cover letters in my blog for which you can find the link at the bottom and they are free to use for your convenience. You can use cover letters for your online applications as well as for e-mailing purposes. I have used the body of my cover letters as an e-mail when making contacts with people in accounting industry. It is very important, however, not to make your e-mails sound too general, instead try to make it sound more personal. That is the reason why you should do some research about the people that you are reaching out to.

Getting your research to take you where you want to be might be time consuming and frustrating at times, but it is all worth it at the end of the day. Firstly, I would go on google and type in the name of the company that I want to work for, and then type in the word, “recruiter” or “human resources” or something similar. Once you get the name of the person, I would go on LinkedIn and try to find the person, see what experience they have, what school they went to and so on. Basically you are trying to get a better feel for what type of person the recruiter might be. In addition, you might even get to find out if the person that you are writing a cover letter to is a male or a female, which will decide if you put down Mr. or Ms. at the beginning of your cover letter.

Besides LinkedIn, there are a few other websites that you could utilize in order for you to find the right person to contact. One of the other websites that I have used most frequently is Jigsaw. Once you type in the website into your browser you will see a search bar at the top of the page. This is where you would put down the name of the company and location of the office where you would like to work. For instance if you want to work for a company XYZ’s Chicago office, you will be typing in exactly this, “XYZ Chicago, IL.” Get the idea?

If you do not find the recruiter that serves your location, do not give up, e-mail any recruiter within the company. The worst thing that you can get, is no response. I have sent out hundreds of e-mails and have not gotten response to more than a half of them but that did not mean the end of the road, to me that just meant that I have to reach out to even more people because the turnaround ratio is not that great. Make sure that you are sending the e-mails out in this frame: Tuesday-Thursday from 8AM until 5PM. You should stick to this for the purpose of looking professional and not getting on people’s nerves.

I have noticed one thing which stayed consistent with my research. If you e-mail employees that are higher up in the company, they are more likely to respond to you and help you push things forward. On the other hand the employees that have lower positions are most likely too swamped with work and most likely do not have time to respond to you or forward your information to the recruiting department. So if I were you and I could not find any recruiter for the company that I am applying with, I would do some research and find a manager in the department in which you would like to work and get in touch with him/her. The manager then, most likely, will forward your cover letter/e-mail to the recruiter and might even put in a good word for you. However, do not forget to attach your resume to all of your e-mails so that it is easier for the person reading it to get a good feel on who you are and what your background is. Your resume should always be formated as a PDF document.

Before we get to the sample cover letters that I have used, let’s go over what we have just covered:

• Great resume and cover letter.
• Use of your cover letter as an e-mail.
• Research the people that you want to reach out to.
• If you can’t find the particular recruiter, e-mail someone else in the company.
• Contacting the right people.

Sample Cover Letters
100+ Cover Letter Examples

Accounting Interview Preparation

If you have done well with your cover letters and your resume, you should receive an invitation for an interview. Accounting interviews are usually behavior based interviews used to mostly get a feel for the person and see if the candidate would fit well within the company. Throughout all of the accounting interviews that I went through, there was only a handful amount of times where I was asked technical questions. Even then they were not too much in depth and anyone could have answered them if accounting was still fresh in their head.

What you need to know for these interviews is that you have to dress neat and just be comfortable in your own body. The minute you step into the office building of the company that you are interviewing with, you have to be the nicest person possible to everyone in the building, starting from receptionist and ending with the CEO. You need to be liked by the people working at the company so that they would want to hire you and will see themselves working side-by-side with you on a daily basis.

In addition to being nice you should present yourself as being confident. You have to show this through your body language, through the things that you tell them, you are a sales person at that moment, and the product that you are selling is YOU. Ability to convince the employer to “buy” you will be your biggest strength and it only can be done through feeling confident in what you say or do.

As far as the interview questions go, you will have to brush up on MANY interview questions. The first thing that I used to do, was going to websites such as Indeed.com or Glassdoor.com and reading the reviews of people that have interviewed with the company that I will interview with. Some of the reviews posted were extremely beneficial to me, and have provided quite a great deal of interview questions that I was later asked. I was able to prepare for them ahead of time and nailed them without even blinking.

You should prepare well for as many questions that you can possible think of, but always keep in mind that you should NEVER sound like a robot when giving your answers. As a matter of fact, it is perfectly OK if you take your time to answer a question or ask the recruiter to repeat the question or even paraphrase it. It is better to ask them to ask a question in a different way, than for you to give an answer without fully understanding the questions, which might ruin your chances of getting a job. So here are the questions that WILL most definitely come on your interview:

• Tell me about yourself. This questions is asked 99% of the time during the interview. You should have a sales pitch ready to go when this question is asked. It should not be too long but it cannot be too short either. You should be able to tell the recruiter things about you that are related to the position.
• Strengths and weaknesses. Another typical interview question. You should have three strengths and three weaknesses ready before any interview. Your weaknesses cannot be something that is required from the job that you are applying for and they should be slightly converting to become a strength in the future. Each strength and each weakness should have an example from your experience to go with it.
• Guide me through your resume. You have to know your resume inside and out. If there is anything on the resume that you are not comfortable talking about, it should not be on there.
• What is your biggest accomplishment. I was asked this question in almost every interview as well. The interviewer wants to see how you are different from other candidates that are being considered for the same position. It is your time to shine!
• Where do you see yourself in 5 years. Depending on if you know the ladder for the position that you are applying for, you could nail this questions pretty easily. Otherwise I usually asked the recruiter to tell me about the growth opportunities following the position that I am applying for, in order for me to answer that question.
• What motivates you. This is a good time to show the recruiter if you are driven by exceeding expectations, by helping other to succeed and so on.
• Tell me about the time when you had to handle a conflict situation and what did you do. You should use STAR model for questions like this. First you will have to tell the situation, then the task that you had on hand, then the actions that you took, and then the results.
• Why accounting. You have to show why you chose accounting. It is a pretty hard thing to do when everyone knows that accounting is fairly boring career. I used to say that I felt in love with accounting after taking my first accounting course and how I liked problem solving and numbers. I am sure that you can come up with something much better than this answer but it worked for me.
• Why our company. Almost a 100% of the time they will ask you this question. That is when you show the interviewer how much research you have done on their company. If you know more details about the company, its products, financial data and etc., that might just show the employer that you are more excited and interested about interviewing with their company than the other candidates.
• Questions. Many people that go to the interviews might not think about the “Questions” part as a very crucial part of the interview. However, they are completely wrong. Having interesting questions for your interviewers might just turn everything around for you in terms of showing the recruiter how interested you are. Your questions should not be obvious to answer, neither they should be too hard to answer for the person interviewing you. You should never ask an HR person about company’s investments, neither should you ask the VP of accounting department about the benefits that the firm provides. Your questions are the other way of showing these people that you are genuinely interested in working with them and that you have really done your homework.

Not many people enjoy interviewing, but that is something that we will have to do over and over again in our future careers. That is why we have to prepare harder than “the other guy” that is applying for the same position as we are. We get better at interviewing with more practice, so my advice for all of you reading this is this: PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE. But do not forget, you should never memorize what you are going to say, you should just have a brief outline written out, from which you could answer those questions with a nice flow and confidence. For the behavioral questions, you should have at least 10 stories from your work experience that could apply to a few questions each.

After the interview DO NOT FORGET to FOLLOW UP with a THANK YOU E-MAIL

Start your accounting career NOW!

For quite some time I have been wondering around the internet while trying to find the answer to my question. What is the right way to go about a career in accounting? I was applying online like a mad man, but have not received the results that I was hoping to receive. All of the job applications that I was wasting my time on filling out, seemed to have gone to the trash bin the minute I clicked “Submit.” I did not take a step back and look at the bigger picture; I did not try to get into the nitty gritty details of the hiring process of the companies that had positions open. To sum this all up, I made a lot of mistakes but those mistakes made me stronger.

Making mistakes was probably the most valuable experience that I have gained during this process. Making mistakes made me learn what not to do, and adjust my actions accordingly. I have made a lot of adjustments to my networking and job search approach until it finally started working. Currently, I have been helping some of the students that I went to college with, to get the jobs that they want. And trust me, seeing them get those jobs is a very fulfilling feeling that I get.

This is the biggest reason why I want to share my experience with you, because if you are reading this, you are either looking for new opportunities in accounting or you do not have a job and do not know where to begin. I honestly wish that I could have found something like this that I am writing right now, when I was looking to start my career. Now that I have gone through countless interviews and have gotten feedback from recruiters themselves, I want to share this with you and I hope that it will be beneficial and relevant to your job search in accounting. So just stick to me and you will gain very valuable information that WILL be extremely useful for you in the near future.

LET’S BEGIN!!!