Interviewing on the Sly

When searching for a new job, dealing with prospective employers is stressful enough: the numerous rejections before you get to yes, grueling interviews, tense salary negotiations and more. But the most universal need to conceal your job search—especially the interviews—from your present employer, and the result distracts many job seekers from preparing for interviews and even conducting them properly.

Here are several suggestions on how to mitigate the troubles of the professional who must protect his current job while interviewing for a new one. The toughest challenges fall into three categories: scheduling interviews into and around the workday, dressing to impress without setting off alarms at work and finding excuses for those mysterious “appointments”.

Scheduling interviews. The best strategy for scheduling job interviews is to set expectations with your prospects about the limits work places on your availability while remaining as flexible as possible. Tell the recruiter or prospective employer early on about your hours of availability for phone calls.  Many initial screening interviews are scheduled by phone. Tight schedules notwithstanding, it’s critical to your present employment security to avoid doing phone interviews while the boss might be listening from the other side of the partition. 

Schedule your calls; don’t try to do them on the fly. Even communicating with the prospective employer to arrange the interview can be problematic. You’ve got to be creative-maybe take your lunch hour from 1 to 2, when more managers at the prospective employer are likely to be back at their desks to take your call. Some impatient employers and recruiters may not be satisfied with once a day email of job seekers who wisely want to avoid their work computers. Get Web service for your cell phone or get a Blackberry. Ten dollars a month for Web access is a small price to pay.

Pulling a Clark Kent. You know the drill: You work in a khakis or jeans office, but you’ve got to wear a suit to a lunch interview. If you need to pull a Clark Kent, plan what will serve as your phone booth in advance.

Some have changed in a deserted parking lot or you can use hotel or library restrooms. But the restroom of the coffee shop nearest your office is a bad place to dress up incognito.

Another tactic is to create a diversion with decoy dress-up days. Start wearing dress clothes to work one or two days a week. You may receive suspicious glances and knowing remarks at first, but the reaction will likely fade with time.

You can reduce the risk of raising suspicions by not dressing up more than necessary for a particular interview. Call up the receptionist or someone in HR and ask what’s the dress code. For your interview, go one level up from there.

Making excuses. Now to face your biggest cold-sweat moment this side of the interview: Communicating your workday absence to the boss. Some observers advise forthcoming honesty. You need to maintain a very straight forward approach. If anyone questions you, say you have an appointment. The less explaining you do, the less you’ll have to cover up. But if your employer corners you to ask about your “appointment”, deception can be justified, some believe. One should tell the truth when at all possible. But it depends on the situation and environment you’re working in. If you see no alternative, you may be forced to tell the whole truth. Sometimes you have to hide the truth, because telling the truth would cause greater harm. So it might be that saying you have a doctor’s appointment is ethically permissible. The bottom line—once you get to the point in your career where you need to make a change, there’s nothing you can do about the need to lead a double life.

(taken from monster.com—John Rossheim)