Sarah Doll leads online lender Enova’s talent management team. Doll directs a team of 10 whose charge it is to fill the 200-plus positions that open up each year, a pace that’s fueled by annual revenue growth of 31 percent in the last four years. 40 percent of new hires are fresh out of school.
Doll’s been at it for six years, since she was brought on as Enova’s first recruiter. In that time, she’s seen a lot of impressive candidates, and some impressively clueless ones. And she’s figured out how to spot what she wants in a hurry — Enova receives upward of 1,000 applicants for some of the more popular roles.
Doll sat down with Grid to offer a few war stories and offers five tips on how to ace an interview.
Cover letters don’t matter one single bit.
As job-seekers, everyone’s been told to craft a cover letter. We don’t care about the cover letters. We don’t read them. We look at the resume, and how the roles fit together.
I don’t care if someone even has a cover letter. If they do, out of courtesy, we’ll open it up. Yes, [recruiters] all have stories where we read an extremely engaging cover letter. But it’s once in every three or four years, typically in a creative job. Just want to get right into your experience, what you’ve actually accomplished, what you’ve actually done.
For your resume, if it’s tailored it to the job, it makes it so much easier for the recruiter to see. Another piece of advice would just be honesty. A lot of people inflate their skills, and we’ll find that out on the phone interview because we’ll ask technical questions. Resumes should really be focused on results.
Being concise is key. It’s pretty annoying when they list out their companies and dates, but then in another section, they put what they did.
Don’t bring your significant other to dinner
For local candidates who make it through the interview process, we take them out out to dinner, or have 1-3 people to meet them for lunch. We’ve had candidates bring their significant other. That would be appropriate if we said plus one, but we don’t. It’s happened a couple of times this year. For non-local candidates, fly them in, put them up in a hotel.
One candidate from out of town asked us to fly his significant other in for the weekend. He ended up being an hour late to the first interview. He didn’t get a second one.
Wear flip flops after you get the job.
Obviously the business world is turning more casual and suits aren’t required for interviews anymore. But we’ve had candidates take it a little too far, coming in here in shorts and flip-flops. While our website says that “we wear shorts and flipflops to work” so do some of our job descriptions, it’s not appropriate for the interview. I know you want to fit in, but it’s definitely not the time.
Stop talking about when you got drunk.
We do hire a lot of new grads. Just in their communication, they’re often a little bit too casual. Especially with the recruiter. Dropping some inappropriate language, profanity, and recently one of the recruiters was having a phone interview with someone still in college. For some reason, he started telling her about an “enthusiastic” frat party. That crossed the line. We’re not best friends. I’ll be your advocate, but you’re being a little bit too casual.
Don’t demand a window office. Especially not if you’re 23.
I had someone interviewing for a position on my team, a candidate who had maybe one or two years experience, and I really liked him. He came in for a final interview with me, asked if I could meet him at night, around 6:30. At the end of the interview, he asked if he could see where he could be sitting. I showed him, and he basically said, ‘I really need my own office — with a window.’ Up until that moment, I would have hired him.
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